


drawn in

by seabear



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Nude Modeling, Pining, Slow Burn, also wouldn't be opposed to ikea sponsoring this fic, and keith the hermit who loves him, lowkey needy exhibitionist lance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-03-09 11:44:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13480791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seabear/pseuds/seabear
Summary: “Go to art school,they said,” Keith grumbles, shivering against the cold as he struggles to get through the revolving door with his portfolio, pad and backpack.“It’ll be fun,they said.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for off-screen/referenced emotional abuse and implied physical abuse by a parent.

Everyone says it’s not as weird as it seems. 

“After about five seconds you just start seeing shapes and lines—it’s like drawing anything else,” Pidge had explained to him. He hadn’t even really expressed any sort of apprehension over the whole thing, but somehow she still knew.

The Middlebrook Art League is mostly used as a gallery space for student projects from the local university, but upstairs are several studios that can be reserved at any given time during the school year. After a fire caused by freak accident during a performance piece damaged half the VA building studios, most of the Intro courses had to move either into cramped traditional classrooms, or off campus. Which is why Keith has to wake up at seven on a frigid January morning to make the forty-five minute drive out to the League.

To draw naked people.

 _“Go to art school,_ they said,” Keith grumbles, shivering against the cold as he struggles to get through the revolving door with his portfolio, pad and backpack. _“It’ll be fun,_ they said.”

Up and around the stairwell to the third floor, Keith pauses outside the door. Through it he can hear the scrape of stools and easels being moved, voices talking and laughing. He draws in a deep breath, the smell of paint and paper, burnt coffee and lingering cigarette smoke, and pushes inside.

The room is stiflingly hot—a dry, thudding heat that rips at his throat and wrings out his eyes. He coughs, strips off his jacket and sweater, and starts setting up with the other students. They’ve all learned by now not to try and approach him, unless they want all of their prodding questions to be answered with noncommittal noises and blatantly disinterested shrugs. Instead, everyone huddles together in bunches around him, speaking in low voices like they’re trying not to wake the walls and the floorboards. 

“...backflipped right into the orchestra pit! Took out half the wind section. And honestly? Chances are if you play the flute you’ve karmically earned a bit of bodily harm.”

Keith winces. Everyone, that is, except for one of the fashion design girls and…some photography kid? Standing and talking to Allura with his back turned to Keith, hands flying. He’s speaking loudly enough that everyone is casting sidelong glances his way, voice piercing through the hot air, his laugh is so sudden and sharp in the way it rebounds in the small space it makes. Combined with the dry, scraping heat, the weighted pull of early morning exhaustion, and the distinct lack of caffeine in his bloodstream—all of it sets off a vicious tear of insults that Keith mentally blasts in this kid’s direction. _Shut up, shut up, shut up._

Shiro walks in, pristinely clean cut in comparison to the bedraggled students slumped over in every corner. “Morning, everyone. I know, I know—it’s hot in here. But trust me, it gets drafty in these studios when you’re not wearing anything in January. Lance?”

“Right here.” Keith turns his head and watches the photography kid, who apparently isn’t a student at all, slide to the center of the room. He raises a gloved hand, giving the class a short salute, still wrapped up in all his winter gear including a puffy jacket, poof ball hat, and a scarf that likely stretched for miles that his fat mouth still manages to fight his way through over the top. “Lance. You’ll be drawing my sweet bod, nice to meet you.”

“I was thinking we could do one or two 15 minute poses as a warm up,” Shiro’s only talking to Lance, but the entire class is listening, the entire class is staring at Lance, who’d unfurled his scarf and shrugged off his jacket, all angle fighting thin cotton and denim underneath. “Two half hour poses. We’ll break for lunch for twenty and then just go straight through with one pose for the remaining time.”

“Sounds solid,” Lance says, tugging off his gloves and hat, revealing dark brown licks of hair sticking out every which way. His waist is narrow, ending with slim hips, but Keith keeps looking back up at his broader shoulders. “Do you want me sitting, standing, lying down…? Any preferences, guys?”

No one says a word, though Keith has the sudden surging, heated thought _lying down_ that catches him so off guard it almost makes him dizzy. Shiro answers for them, “Whatever you find comfortable. There’s a bathroom down the hall and a robe in the corner if—”

“Nah.” Lance is already peeling off his shirt. “I’m good.”

The entire class collectively tries not to stare at the boy gracelessly stripping in the middle of the room, his shirt revealing a lithe torso scattered with dark freckles and a thick line of hair leading the way for his hands to undo his pants, thumbs hooking under the waistband and pulling the jeans and his underwear off in one go. Keith concentrates on sharpening his pencils, distractedly brushing the shaving off his shirt, testing the points. His eyes flitter up, then back down, eyebrows drawn together. Okay, yes, he’s good looking. He’s also loud and without any sort of modesty or inhibition, and even if he wasn’t, Keith’s not looking. For someone to date or at the knots in Lance’s spine leading down to the smooth dip of his lower back, the dimples just before the curve of—

He’s not looking.

 _There’s no way he’ll be any good,_ Keith reminds himself of how Lance couldn’t even stand still when Shiro was explaining the time frame to him, shifting his weight from foot to foot, wringing his hands, making ridiculous faces. _No. Way._

“Okay, fifteen minutes everyone. And keep in mind the notes on foreshortening we went over last class,” Shiro sets the cookie timer he uses to keep track of poses, and Lance immediately melts into air. He seems conscious of everyone’s position in the room, working with the light as he adjusts himself into a comfortable pose that’s both sturdy and relaxed, from every angle. Something in his expression shifts—he stops looking so young with his smirk stretched mouth and wide eyes, subduing into something softer, something oddly striking in the shadows and highlights caused by the tilt of his head, the slope of his shoulders, the slight cock of his slim hips, with one hand reaching up to rest on the same shoulder. His hands. Keith could just do a study on his hands for the entire class.

Keith realizes when Shiro clears his throat that he’s been staring for almost a full minute now, and tries not to feel caught under those knowing eyes as he picks up his charcoal and sets to work. Lance seems like he’s not even breathing he’s so still, and Keith finds himself holding his own breath.

The timer beeps, and the haze of intense focus is lifted as Shiro says, “New pose.”

Lance sits for this one, one arm slung over the back of the chair while his opposite hand rests on his thigh, head lolled to the side, the curve of his long neck so impossible to ignore that it’s where Keith has to start first.

Ten minutes in, Shiro comes up behind him, and says softly, “Use the brown as your middle tone—don’t overdo it with the heavy shadows.”

Keith nods, considering, and goes in with his eraser to take some of the black out. He always has the tendency to go to dark, heavy handed and convinced there are more shadows than there really are. He exhales, refocuses, and tries his best not to glare at Matt’s proportionally perfect piece a few feet over.

The thirty minute pose passes by suspiciously fast, and Keith’s overworked the piece so horribly it’s just a blur of smeared charcoal with some desperate highlights thrown on over the black. A mess. He wants to tear it in half, then again, then again.

He gets ready for the last pose instead, while everyone else pulls out their food and lounge around in casual conversations that Keith could never fit himself in even if he wanted to. Lance shrugs the robe on and goes around the room, easily slipping into conversations with each student. The closer he moves to Keith, the more and more Keith looks at his pieces and hates them. He makes a b-line for the door. He can wait out the next ten minutes in the bathroom, by the vending machines, anywhere but this hotbox of a studio, waiting for Lance to saunter over with the deep v of his robe exposing a long triangle of skin, dipping down almost to his naval.

Matt is peeling a Reese’s out of its wrapper when Keith finds him by the vending machines. Hanging out with Pidge more or less meant had to become friendly with Matt. The word friend is still a strain for Keith to conjur up, but Matt’s not put off by his attitude and is easygoing enough that he never presses Keith for small talk. Or worse, asks him to _chill sometime._ He offers one, and Keith is too stressed not to take it, stuffing the whole thing into his mouth at once. He sighs at the melt of chocolate, the sweetness, chewing slowly.

“That model’s really good,” Matt remarks. 

“Hm.”

“I’ve never seen the model strip down in front of the class.” He shakes his head. “And I’ve never seen a male model this young. Especially not one that can hold a pose like that.”

“Yeah,” Keith surprises himself with the tone of his own voice, this marginally impressed lilt. Matt looks a little surprised as well, eyebrows raised, smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He adds, “For such an obnoxious jackass.”

“Really? ‘Cause in there, you were kind of…” Matt trials off, like he’s not sure what it is he’s trying to say. Or maybe if he can’t decide whether or not to say it.

Keith turns to look at him sharply. “What?”

“Nothing, nevermind,” Matt says quickly, barely hiding his smile as he stands. “See you back in there.”

-

Just as Keith walks back in, Lance is looking at his pieces, and he has to resist the urge to aboutface and stalk back out of the room. He doesn’t know if he can stand there and listen to Lance lie and say how _interesting_ he thinks Keith’s _style_ is.

He looks up and meets Keith’s gaze, mouth open, probably about to loudly announce whatever cordial nicety that’s on the tip of his tongue when Shiro sweeps their attention back to the center of the room with, “Everybody ready? Lance?”

“Yeah. Let’s do this.” Lance hops back onto the platform and shrugs the robe off. Keith’s eyes burn.

“We’ll take a breather at the forty-five minute mark and resume the same pose after.” The timer beeps, and Shiro smiles. “Let’s make art.”

Keith takes a second, inhaling and exhaling slowly, reminding himself to breathe before picking up his charcoal and shaking out his hand. Keep it loose, keep it light. He tries to think of nothing but the curve of Lance’s plush mouth, the light against the cut of his cheekbone, the way that light follows the length of his body. It’s the simplest pose by far, but there’s an intimacy in the way Lance just stands there bathed in warm light, unmoving, barely blinking, like he’s waiting. Keith actually likes how the piece is coming along. Something clicks, and every line falls the way he needs it to against the paper without him second guessing every other stroke and going after it with his blackened kneaded eraser.

At the halfway point Lance breaks the pose to stretch, not bothering with the robe as he stands. Keith concentrates on taking out some of the shading with his eraser, pointedly not looking at Lance, who he thinks might be looking at him, but he can’t be sure unless he looks up. 

Which he can’t do.

He just remembers Matt’s face when he said, _really? ‘Cause in there you were kind of…_

Keith pulls apart his kneaded eraser, rolling it back together over and over with more force than is probably necessary.

Lance seamlessly falls back into his exact pose from minutes before, adjusting himself slightly in certain places where he sees fit, methodically replicating his posture from the tilt of his head to the point of his toes. Keith hates that he’s so impressed.

The timer goes off, cutting through the silence, haze of concentration lifting as Shiro says, “All right, pencils down, erasers down—I just want to give you all some last minute notes and then we can all head out. So stay put.” His eyes linger on Keith for just split second, and he knows the stay put is directed at him and his anxiously jiggling knee. His piece isn’t finished, and the highlights are too intense in places where they shouldn’t be, and there’s something just off about the left shoulder. And Lance is dressed again, Allura is monopolizing his attention, but he still keeps glancing over at Keith like he wants to talk to him or something, which no. No, no, no. 

“Very nice, Keith.” Shiro claps him on the back, startling him out of his panic. “Everything’s in proportion—and you went easy on the darks where you didn’t need them as much. The left shoulder is a little under defined, but that’s a timing issue. Other than that, this could be part of your semester portfolio, easily.”

Keith gives a short nod, exhaling when Shiro walks away. When he looks up, Lance is gone. Most of the class is, and the spring loaded tightness in the center of his back eases. He takes his time packing up, in case anyone might be lingering out in the hallway or the parking lot, before heading out.

-

Keith draws to remember.

He remembered his mom in pieces. He was so young when she left, her true face blurred in his mind, but even without pristine memories or pictures he had little bits. The reddest red for her mouth, the darkest black for her eyes, so dark he could tear through paper from pressing down so hard. He drew on scraps, napkins, shopping bags with his coveted box of crayons, pens and pencils lifted from motel rooms and diners. When he and his dad left west Texas he drew the desert, and when they left SoCal and headed north he drew the ocean, and when his dad left he drew nothing. Not for a long time.

He thinks, as he burns out of the stairwell, that he’ll remember Lance’s legs the most. Maybe his eyelashes, too. The dip of his collarbone. 

“Woah!”

Keith rips himself back, eyes meeting another bright, startled pair. A suspended moment passes with neither of them saying anything until Lance holds his hands up, conceding. “Sorry, I wasn’t—you’re Keith, right?”

Keith’s head snaps towards the door, and he charges forward. “I have to go.”

“Um.” Lance jogs to keep up with him as he makes his way out the door. “So, listen, I just wanted to tell you that—hey, could you maybe stop running away from me for like two seconds? I swear I don’t have cooties or whatever it is you clearly think I’m afflicted with.” Keith makes no move to slow down, and he hears Lance huff, “Or keep running. That’s cool, too. If you’re into being an ass.”

Keith doesn’t answer him, just makes his way over to his car, popping the trunk and throwing the portfolio inside, and just as he’s about to slam it shut, Lance’s hand darts out and stops him. “Hey, dude, I’m just trying to say I think you’re, like, stupidly talented and your pieces today were my favorite out of everyone’s. And I didn’t get a chance to see the last one and I was wondering if you could show me.”

Keith’s trying his hardest to glare, but Lance is glaring right back. He should say Lance isn’t entitled to anything. He should say nothing and just leave. He should do anything but sigh and reach into the trunk, sliding out the last pieces.

Lance peels off the newsprint protecting it and Keith rocks back onto his heels, hands shoved into his pockets.

“Dang,” he says, bringing his face in close. “This is amazing. Totally makes up for you being an ass the whole time.”

Keith’s bones vibrate, and he’s not sure if it’s from the cold or from the anxiety. “Are you done?”

“They’re called manners, dude.”

Keith blinks. “You just called me an ass. Twice.”

“Well, you are.” Lance re-covers the piece. “You glare at me the entire session, avoid me during breaks, almost run me down without saying sorry—”

“That was _your_ fault.”

“—and don’t think I didn’t hear you trash talking me in the hallway earlier. Which, mad classy, dude, really. And now you won’t even let me compliment you without looking like you wanna vomit angst all over me. God, you’re like a My Chem song personified,” Lance sighs, closes Keith’s trunk for him. “And it totally wasn’t my fault—you were running out of the gallery like a bat outta hell. I was just trying to say hi.”

“Don’t say anything next time.” 

Lance’s face, which has only been stretched into amiable, even downright goofy expressions, folds with genuine hurt. Keith doesn’t have time for this. 

He nods over to Allura, who’s Mercedes looks just as polished and sleek as she does. “Your girlfriend’s waiting.”

“Who—oh.” Lance turns his neck. “The fact that you think I’m capable enough to be Allura’s boyfriend is inadvertently the nicest thing you’ve said to me. Wrong, but nice.” Lance slaps him on the shoulder as he takes a step backwards. “Peace out, Hawthorne Heights.”

Keith watches him go without really meaning to, breath pluming out of him in puffs. When he gets a hold of himself enough to look away, he slides into the driver’s seat of his car and presses his forehead against the steering wheel for a few minutes before plugging the keys in the ignition and driving off.

-

“How was drawing naked fat ladies?” Pidge slurps loudly at some ridiculous iced whipped cream concoction, even though it’s barely staying on the right side of 30 degrees.

“She was a naked skinny boy,” Keith answers, and resists the urge to describe Lance down to every last eyelash. He rubs a hand down his face. It’d been nearly a week since his figure drawing class, and Lance is still stuck in his head like a song. The worst of it being that every time Lance’s body replays, he feels ignited, his hands constantly itching to grab pens and pencils, muscle memory craving to commit lines to paper, long legs and prominent hip bones and knobby knuckles. 

“That sucks. Fat chicks are the best to draw. Anyone under 200 pounds is boring.” Another loud slurp. “How was the skinny boy, then?”

Keith shrugs, letting the heat from his own drink pinch at his fingers through the cup.

She tries, “How’s Shiro’s class in general? It kind of kicked my butt last year. The evaluations were pretty brutal.”

Keith shrugs again. It’s hard, what else can he say? The sketchbook assignments, and class evaluations and critique, not to mention the—

“The final portfolio,” he groans, dropping his head against the table. “Fuck.”

“Dude,” Pidge’s voice lifts with a laugh. “It’s February. You’ve got time.” “I threw out all my pieces,” Keith says. Which he did, except for one. “And we have midterm evaluations next month.” 

“You…” Pidge stares. “You threw out all your pieces?”

He sips at his coffee, not bothering to repeat himself. Ever since coming back from winter break, he’s felt this bubbling anxiety that keeps bursting out of him in fits. His skin too tight, his chest too achy, a wrongness settled deep in his bones.

Pidge seems to get it, on some level, which is probably why he likes to be around, because she shakes off his silence and says, “You can always work something out with Shiro. He’s probably got some model contacts you could work with like, outside of class.”

Keith’s mind goes wonderfully, purposefully blank.

“Matt poses for people sometimes,” Pidge goes on. “I mean, he kind of sucks at it, but he’s an option. An option you’ll only have to pay in energy drinks and maybe sour gummy worms.”

He leans back in his chair. “I’ll figure something out.”

-

“Keith,” Shiro greets him with a smile. For a guy who’s so well put together his office is an explosion of disorganized chaos, with stray papers bubbling up out of files and drawers, frames and canvases stacked against the walls and taking up most of the floor space, the desk smothered in handmade trinkets that were most likely thank you’s from his former students. He motions to the seat opposite him, “Sit. What’s on your mind?”

“I uh,” Keith clears his throat. “I’m worried about keeping on track for the number of pieces we need for our final portfolio. I’m uh, not happy with how a lot of them have turned out. The ones we’ve done in class, and I know we’re doing evaluations next month, and I thought...uh, maybe you had some model contacts I could, uh. Use.”

“Your classwork and your assignments have been excellent, Keith. You should be perfectly fine with the number and quality of pieces you’ve made.”

Keith squirms in his seat. “I’m not really...happy with them.”

Shiro’s smile never wavers. Keith’s not sure if it ever has, since the first moment they met over a year ago when Keith had gone in for a portfolio review. It’s uncomfortable as hell, because it feels like he can read Keith’s thoughts, knows exactly how he’s feeling without Keith even saying. But for those same reasons, it’s a relief. 

“Hold on, one second.” He reaches into the flood of papers on his desk, shuffling through them before pulling out a single post-it, copying it onto another and handing it to Keith. “These are the numbers of some of the models I like working with. They’re very negotiable on prices, especially for students. I think you’d really benefit from a private session where you could spend time on and refine your pieces.”

When Keith looks down at the note, Lance McClain is the first name on the list.

-

It takes two weeks to finally do it, because Keith hates making phone calls. He hates scheduling appointments, he hates ordering food, and now he can add searching for a nude model to the list.

He thinks about maybe calling one of the other models; since that first class Shiro has brought in a rotating cast of characters. Most of them older women, none of them bad at modelling, but none of them....none of them did what Lance could do, at least not for Keith. He shouldn’t waste his time or theirs by pretending he’s not looking for something specific. Someone specific.

He punches in the numbers and hits the call button before the has a chance to second guess himself, absently tearing at the hole at the bottom of his shirt as he listens to the ring.

“Hello?” the voice is decidedly not Lance’s, high and feminine and startling. Keith can’t decide if the fact that he’s talking to someone else makes it better or worse.

“Uh, I—is Lance there?” he finally gets out, wincing at his stutter. 

“Mmhm, who’s this?” 

“Keith. Uh.” he makes a face. “From—”

“Hold on,” there’s a shuffle, the phone being put down before, “Lance!”

Distant, he can hear, _“Yeah ma?”_

The rest of the conversation is hushed, Keith straining to parse out half sounds that might be words when Lance picks up, the suddenly all too loud, “Keith?” making him jump, fumbling with his phone.

“I—yeah, I’m here.” 

“How’s the new album coming? Heavy yet melodic?” he can hear the curve of Lance’s grin in his words.

Keith shoots a look at the phone before pressing it back to his ear. “What?”

“Joking, dude. You called for a reason, I’m guessing?”

“Shiro said—” he coughs, “Shiro said you’d be available for modeling? For students?”

“Oh,” the note of his voice is flat and sits weirdly in Keith’s ear before it’s smothered by, “Oh! Yeah. All the time. I’m free this week, actually, if you—”

“Friday,” Keith blurts, relaxes himself and repeats, “Friday’d be good. Around one. In the VA building lobby. I’ll meet you.”

“Yeah, no, Friday works,” Lance says easily. “So—”

“I have to go,” Keith cuts him off, ending the call and slamming the phone down. He stops, exhales slowly, and turns around. The only thing he sees, the only things in what’s supposed to be his living room, are his figure drawing pieces spread out across the floor. The last few from Monday’s class, and all the others from Lance’s session. The difference in quality is nearly night and day. Keith groans, rubbing a hand down his face.

He examines the last pose closer—he touched up the shoulder, and it’s not bugging him as much anymore. The likeness...isn’t terrible. From the upturned nose to the length of his legs and everything in between. His eyes catch on the soft cock he’d distractedly sketched in and hadn’t bothered refining, mostly in shadow. When you don’t have time to draw every detail during a pose, you have to suggest; it’s one of the first things he learned. Probably because that was what he’d done in almost every aspect of his life—what he didn’t have time to dwell on because of his mom, and then his dad, and then everything in between and beyond, he could only suggest in vague platitudes to himself. He didn’t have to think about this right now, he could work on it later.

Nothing about Lance suggests anything. He just is. Keith shuffles the sheets back into his portfolio, thinking, _later._

-

They meet outside the VA building, both walking up at the same time, Lance smiling and waving as he goes, “So like, we didn’t discuss prices on the phone but—”

“Here.” Keith thrusts over an envelope. “Tell me if that’s not enough.”

Lance peeks in at the bills, counting them quickly before inhaling sharply, eyes fluttering as he tightly says, “I—yeah, this is enough. Jesus. You realize I’m just a model, right? I don’t do funny stuff. Well, I am funny. Hilarious, even. But judging by the perfect ten you score on the Brood-o-Meter, neither you nor your eyebrows will probably appreciate it.”

Keith ignores him, because that’s all he really can do. Trying to sift whatever the hell Lance is trying to say between bad jokes and knotted references seems too exhausting to even try when he knows Lance will just spit out more nonsensical blither in a few moments anyway. “I don’t live far from campus. We can walk.”

“Um,” he hears Lance’s scrambling footsteps behind his own. “Okay…?”

He realizes Lance is probably having reservations about just taking Keith’s word, especially when he hops off the path and into woods, but Keith can’t help him—reassurance has never been one of his strong suits, especially the positive kind. He just stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and weaves in and out of the trees, dead leaves crunching underfoot. It hasn’t snowed yet this year.

“So, are you some kind of…reclusive lumberjack?” Lance narrowly avoids tripping over a fallen branch to keep up with him. “Or is this a Unabomber kind of thing? Please, God, tell me this isn’t a Unabomber kind of thing. You’re not gonna hogtie me in a cave and read your 90 page manifesto about the evils of technology out loud are you? I’ve seen like two whole episodes of Black Mirror, so trust me when I say that’s enough.”

The only answer Keith supplies him with is, “I just bought a food processor.”

“Oh,” Lance says in a softer voice, like this is some vital piece of piece of information he can use to put together Keith’s mind. He jogs to catch up to Keith. “So, decidedly not a Unabomber. Are you an ex-nationally ranked figure skater who allegedly hired a hitman to take out your competition before the Olympics and now you live deep in the woods to hide from the media that vilifies you?”

Keith’s molars grind together, and if he doesn’t warn Lance about the slippery patch of wet leaves and he faceplants in the mud, well, that’s not Keith’s problem

-

Keith’s life is very quiet.

He drives with the radio off, a habit from years on his old bike. He doesn’t own a television, a habit from a childhood spent in motel rooms where TVs were an amenity. He doesn’t go out to crowded places or hang out in groups of people or invite people back into his home, a habit from always.

Lance?

Lance is not quiet. 

Not at all.

“Sweet digs,” Lance says appreciatively as he unwraps the scarf from around his neck. “Very…uh. Empty. Like seriously empty. Did you just move in?”

Keith narrows his eyes. “No.”

Lance stares. “There’s no furniture.”

“I don’t need any.”

“You don’t,” Lance says slowly, “need any furniture?”

Keith feels his jaw tick.

“How long have you not needed any furniture?”

Keith pushes past him, towards the steps. “I’m getting my board.”

He tries not to race upstairs and back—paces himself and takes in the sounds of someone else in his home. He breathes steady, in and out, grabbing his drawing board and sheets and pencils, one at a time. He swallows thickly in the bareness of his bedroom and heads back downstairs on a sharp, sure inhale.

He only notices when he hits that bottom step that Lance is naked. He immediately averts his eyes to the ceiling.

“Hey, so—” Lance cuts himself off when he notices Keith’s sudden fascination with the living room sconces. “I just assumed this was a nude thing. Oh god, wasn’t this a nude thing? Please tell me this was a nude thing.”

“It is.” Keith hadn’t been comfortable enough to ask if this would, in fact, be a nude thing. He’d figured since it’d never been specified that it wasn’t, but Lance’s extremely apparent lack of clothing would indicate otherwise. He blinks and focuses on setting up his board. “The west facing windows will give us some good natural lighting. So…”

“Right,” Lance says, suddenly shy with a ducked head and hunched shoulders, voice bordering on soft. “Lead the way.”

-

“How do you want me?”

Keith feels heat creep up the back of his neck. “I uh, thought we could do two thirty minute poses and then a one hour pose.”

“Yeah, but like,” Lance motions wildly, and Keith is trying his hardest not to stare. “Do want me standing, sitting, lying down…What?”

“Whatever’s…comfortable,” he says, and then carefully, “Um, one lying down, later.”

“Good deal.” Lance hops in front of the French doors the lead back onto the patio, sunlight falling over the planes of his skin, darkness in the grooves of his muscles, the dips his hip bones. Keith watches him ease against the tilt of the earth, head turning to stare out the window, arm leaning against the molding, one ankle tucking behind the other. Keith takes a moment to let himself get taken away before he brings himself back with a forceful blink, moving around to find his preferred angle. The quiet of the would-be dining room is filled with the purposeful scratching of his pencils, the glass stunted sounds of the outside word. 

After half an hour they switch to a pose with Lance sitting against the wall, one leg retracted and half of his body drenched in the glow of the slanted afternoon light, head lolled slightly, eyelashes casting spider leg shadows across the crests of his cheekbones that Keith finds himself paying particular attention to.

Lance’s growling stomach is what finally breaks the trance, both of them turning their gazes to the source of the gurgling. Lance’s cheeks turn pink, and he grins sheepishly just as Keith heads for the kitchen without another word. He realizes halfway down the hallway that he really doesn’t have anything to eat. Ordering something—would that be like, _okay?_ Lance would end up staying longer, and it feels too close to something casual and easy, something that friends would do. But hell, he’s been staring at Lance’s naked body for an hour now, ordering food shouldn’t be weird. (But it is—it’s an anxious strangeness that Keith can’t shake out of the clench of his rib cage or the sweat along his hairline.)

When Keith walks back into the dining room to ask Lance what he might want and finds him sitting in the middle of the empty room, leaning in close to Keith’s drawings. Something about watching this boy look at his pieces in his empty home feels intimate, regardless of the endless span of skin, the wanton bend of wiry limbs, the wordless movement of his plush mouth bound into a barely there smile. Sitting there is Lance’s easy person, so at peace with himself, the gentle murmur of a heartbeat filling the lifeless body of Keith’s house.

Lance finally senses him in the doorway, and only says, “Hey.”

Keith has to cough to stop his voice from cracking, phone in hand. “I was just going to maybe order something…everything I have here is—it would just be easier. What do you feel like?”

“Oh yo, pizza would be _perfect_ right now,” he carefully sets the drawings down and leaps to his bare feet. “Gino’s is the closest, right? They have the best garlic knots. So good. I’ll order, dude. The second the order girl sees my number she’ll throw ‘em in for free.”

Distracted, Keith asks, “Why?”

“She drew me last semester. Found it hard not to fall for all this.” Lance waggles his eyebrows, motioning to his naked body in big, swoopy circles before practically skipping into the living room to grab his phone. “Yo, what’s the address?” Keith rubs at the hot splotches high up in his cheeks, down his neck, past the collar of his shirt. _Stop,_ he thinks. _Get a hold of yourself._

He walks into the living room, relieved mostly to see Lance has wiggled back into his boxer briefs, already on the phone. “Yeah, with extra cheese. Mmhmm. That fast? Awesome. Thanks Heather. You, too.” He ends the call and grins, wide and aimed right at Keith’s pulse. “Twenty minutes. I just got cheese, because I wasn’t sure what you wanted. I am starving, by the by.” He shrugs his sweatshirt back on, but leaves his jeans, walking past Keith into the kitchen. Keith follows silently, stupidly. Lance turns, asking, “So you live here alone?”

Keith stares, wondering what answer would make the most sense.

“I’ll take your awkwardly long pause as a yes.” Lance is going through his cabinets, like he doesn’t care that Keith can see him. “Man, and I thought I had nothing to eat at my place….” He yanks open the last door and grins, pointing. “Found the food processor. We could puree that box of Kashi you have and, y’know, go seven whole grains of wild.”

Is Keith meant to know what to say to that?

“You mind if I grab myself something to drink? Since you’re kind of refusing to offer me anything?” He’s already got the glass, and Keith startles himself into go-mode, grabbing various bottles out of the fridge. When he closes the door, Lance is right there, peering curiously at him while musing, “I guess it’s been awhile since you’ve had guests?”

Keith shoves the bottle he’s holding in his right hand into Lance’s face without a word. Lance gently moves it aside with a windshield wiper hand and says, “No thanks. Not really into V8. I used it as emergency tomato sauce once…not the best results. But watching Hunk projectile vomit was the highlight of junior year.”

Keith blinks, clutching the V8 to his chest.

Lance carefully pries it from his hands. “Anyone ever tell you you’re kind of intense?”

Finally a question he could answer. “Pretty much all the time, yeah.”

“Well, as long as you know.” Lance moves to put the bottle back in the fridge, and spends minutes that feel like hours poking through all the nooks and crannies on Keith’s kitchen. Keith thinks he should maybe be like, conversing? Or something? Lance seems unbothered by the silence, which makes Keith shift his weight from foot to foot.

“I thought you’d suck,” Keith blurts. Lance turns, eyebrows lifted. Keith rushes, “At modeling. You’re actually…I didn’t think you’d be as good as you are.”

“Thanks?” Lance snorts. “You’re about as adept at backhanded compliments as I thought you’d be.”

Keith glowers, because he was trying to be nice. “I just meant—”

There’s knocking, and Lance sprints towards the door. “I got it!”

Keith stands alone in his empty kitchen, exhaling slowly.

-

Even watching Lance eat, Keith has to fight the intense urge to draw him. When he struggles with the strings of hot cheese, when he burns his tongue on the first bite, when he circles his tongue around his mouth to catch any stray splotches of sauce. Keith’s vaguely aware of the fact that he’s blatantly staring, but Lance is too wrapped up in his food to really notice.

“So there’s this amazing place—I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s called Ikea? And they have this thing called furniture, which is what most people use to furnish their homes so when they ask models over for figure drawing, they can sit at an actual dining table instead of on the floor,” Lance says after his third slice, licking grease off his fingertips. “Not that this isn’t an enriching experience.”

Keith glares. “I know what furniture is.”

Lance ignores him. “I mean—do you sleep on the floor? Do you even have a bed?”

“I _have_ a bed.”

“I have the worst feeling I’m gonna see this place on the six o’clock news one day after a police raid discovers it’s being used as a meth lab. Are you breaking bad? Is that how you can afford to pay all your nude models so much?”

“You’re my only model,” Keith says—and that finally reaches Lance’s Ground Control, because he freezes. “And I don’t cook meth.”

“That’s exactly what a meth cook would say.” Lance eyes him. “Prove it. Take me on a tour.” Keith watches Lance stand. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. Load up the Jeeps, queue the goat and take me through Jurassic Park.”

Keith stands, sighing. “You’re such a pain.”

“And you’re a jerk—are we just gonna stand here listing each other’s character flaws? This isn’t a Jane Austen novel. Let’s go.” Lance grabs at Keith’s shoulders and starts pushing.

-

The house is his. It’d belonged to his mom’s family, and despite only having the vaguest recollection of her from his earliest memories, when she died she left it to him. He’d been eighteen at the time, having just been kicked out of marine boot camp, having lived the last seven years in and out of group homes—suddenly he owned a house, and had an inheritance.

“Uh, bathroom, laundry, pantry…that door’s to the basement, but there’s nothing really down there.”

Lance narrows his eyes. “Said the meth cook.”

Keith rips open the basement door and clunks down the steps, Lance following closely behind as he gropes at the wall for the light switch. Hitting the bottom, the space shows nothing other than a boiler and support beams, the walls bare of sheet rock with the insulation showing. He expands his arms, eyebrows raised, a silent _see? Nothing._

Lance shoves his hands into his sweatshirt pockets, clearly unsatisfied. Keith notices his bare legs are covered in goosebumps. Lance’s voice brings him back, “Fine. We still have to see the top floor.”

The upstairs is much the same as the ground floor, in that it’s empty, footsteps and whining floorboards echoing, walls white and corners bare. There are guest rooms that’ve never seen guests, closets that’ve never seen clothes, all except for Keith’s room at the end of the hall, which Lance practically bulldozes into before Keith can even think to stop him. And Keith can only stare after him open mouth, indignation flaring hot in his chest, because who the hell just barges into someone’s bedroom? Who just demands and gripes and talks fucking endlessly about absolutely meaningless garbage like Keith is just meant to listen and care when Keith is paying him good money to just sit down and shut up?

“You don’t even have a bed frame.” Lance laughs, bare feet padding into the room while Keith stands in the doorway. He’s so, so aware of the pieces he has tacked to the walls, ones no one else has ever seen.

The first thing Lance does is open the blinds, letting the last remnants of light shine through before he goes over to the wall behind Keith’s desk. He presses in close—face inches from the wall, and goes over each piece with careful eyes. Keith leans against the doorframe, then stands up straight, then leans again.

“You’re better than I thought you’d be.” Lance smiles, echoing Keith from earlier. He turns his head, continuing, “I saw you in the studio and I thought you were some, like, physical therapy student trying to nail their art credit by taking the course—but you…you’re really amazing. You—oh, man, this one is…”

Keith shifts his weight. 

“Oh hey! It’s me.” Lance’s smile breaks into a giant toothy one as he notices the newly pinned portrait. He turns his head. “Do you stare at it every night before you go to sleep?” Keith frowns. Those pieces were on the wall to motivate him—to show himself that he could make decent art. Not to…do whatever it is Lance thinks he does, which probably involves a laundry list of references Keith wouldn’t get, and several jibes about his eyebrows.

“Wait.” Lance backpedals to the bed. “Lemme see if the angle’s right—oh yeah, last thing you see before you sleep, first thing you see when you wake up.”

Lance is in his bed. His weight is dipping the mattress and his legs are tangled in the sheets as he lies on his side and judges the view of the picture. And Keith—

“Take off your clothes.”

Lance bolts upright. “Uh.”

“Cover one leg with the sheets, and kind of…get comfortable.”

Lance looks the farthest thing from comfortable. “Um.”

It takes second to click in his brain how all of this sounds, and Keith just says, “For drawing. So I can draw you.”

“Oh,” Lance says, tone strange against the walls, before he goes, “Oh! Okay, still weird, but significantly less so. Yeah. Go get your stuff and I’ll let my junk hang out all over your bed. Cool.”

Keith rolls his eyes.

-

Keith takes an hour and a half on the final piece, which he tries to compensate Lance for, practically shoving money at him. Because if this isn’t a transaction based deal, if Lance doesn’t take the cash, then what the hell is this?

“Dude, no.” Lance puts his hands up. Behind him, the sun’s gone down, everything inky winter dark beyond the reach of the porchlight. “You’ve already overpaid me, and you spotted me for pizza, and I was asleep for like, half an hour during that so. Seriously, no.”

Keith stands dumbly on the porch, money between his fingers. 

“I don’t go to school and this is my only real work, so…any time you’re in need of a naked dude around.” Lance swerves his whole body. “Who you gonna call?”

Keith blinks. “You?”

“No—dude, c’mon,” Lance looks like he’s never been more disappointed in anyone in his life. “Ghostbusters. You’re gonna call the Ghostbusters. Do you even know what movies are? Moving pictures with sound?”

“Movies kind of conflict with my whole unabomber thing, y’know?” Keith says. And that's when he sees them. Sees the snowflakes coming down, dusting Lance’s hair, his shoulders. It’s the first time it’s snowed this winter. Even having grown up in the southwest and being opposed to the cold on a molecular level, Keith can’t help the way his chest swells whenever it happens. 

There are snowflakes caught in Lance’s eyelashes, and Keith’s breath his caught in his throat. “Guy’s got jokes!” Lance looks dubiously impressed, shouting, “Wait ‘til I tell the boys back at the League—they’ll never believe me.”

Keith makes a face, soft moment shattered by Lance’s big, fat mouth. “Bye, Lance.”

Lance gives a salute as he walks backwards before turning on his heel and running towards the headlights waiting for him through the trees.

-

A week later Keith finds himself surrounded by the separate parts of a dining room table set. It takes him six hours to put it all together, and there are somehow pieces left over. He puts them in a drawer and tries not to think about what they mean he could’ve missed.

-

“Who’re you drawing?”

Keith’s been doodling on a spare napkin in the dining hall while Pidge grabbed drinks. Keith can handle the dining hall. He can. Even if it’s gross and crowded and essentially everything he hates. 

He slams his hand down. “No one.”

“Uh-huh.” She bites at the corner of her mouth, like she’s trying to stop herself from grinning. He glares. “Shut up.”

She rolls her eyes, sitting down. “Don’t get so defensive.”

“I’m not getting defensive.”

She shoots him a look.

He insists, “I’m not.”

But Pidge isn’t looking at him anymore—she’s looking past him, over his shoulder, that grin ticking back into place as she nods her head. “Isn’t that your muse fighting with the ketchup dispenser over there?”

Keith whips his head around, and sure enough Lance is by the condiments, shaking the ketchup with all his wiry might. Keith swallows, throat tightening before swiftly turning back around and saying in a low, firm voice, “We should leave.”

“What? No, we just got here. I’m gonna see if he wants to sit with us.”

Keith jumps. “Pidge, don’t—”

“Keith?”

He twists and of course, Lance is already making his way over. “What are you doing here?” he asks, looking pink and wrapped in too many layers for the overheated food court.

Keith blinks. “Eating.”

Pidge kicks him under the table. He sticks a finger in her drink. Lance looks overwhelmed, which is weirdly refreshing to see. “I meant—”

“He knows what you meant, he’s just being a jerk.” Pidge stands, extending a hand. “I’m Pidge.”

He takes it, smiling. “I remember you. Intro, last year, right? You were really upset that I wasn’t a fat lady.”

“Jeez, you’re right,” she laughs, easy. Keith sinks further down into his chair. “You were _great_ —no wonder Keith’s obsessed with you.”

Keith makes an outraged face at her, and Lance turns to shoot him a sly grin. “Is he now?” Pidge leans in. “He was just—”

“Lance, what—oh,” Allura stops short at the table. “Keith.”

Allura. Allura is severe and ethereal at the best of times, but at least he doesn’t want to sprawl her out on his bed and sketch her down to every last freckle. He lifts a hand in a small wave. Lance explains, “I was just saying hi.”

“You two should stay.” Pidge kicks out the empty chair next to her. “Eat with us.”

Lance licks his lips, looking anywhere but them. “Uh, maybe some other—”

“Oh, thank goodness, this place is packed.” Allura crashes into the open seat next to Keith, and Lance’s words die in his mouth as he sinks into the seat next to Pidge. Keith is staring. He should look at something—anything—else, and when he finally does tear his eyes away he catches Allura cocking at eyebrow at him. He clears his throat and sips at his water. 

“How do you all,” Allura asks, motioning with a manicured hand, “know each other?”

Lance leers. “They’ve both seen me naked.” 

“So have half the people in this food court, Lance. The novelty has worn off at this point.”

“I met Keith at the League,” Pidge explains. “He was looking into taking classes and I essentially harassed him into checking the VA out after seeing his sketchbook.”

Keith makes a face. 

“It was that good?” Allura has both eyebrows raised now.

“Oh come on, you’ve seen his stuff.” Lance flails a hand at Keith. “He’s amazing.”

“So you’ve been telling me for weeks now.” Allura rolls her eyes sharply, and Keith should look at Lance with that same sly grin he’d been served with just minutes before, but he can’t seem to manage anything other than lifting his eyes from his food. Lance is suddenly hyper-focused on his macaroni salad.

“He is really good.” Pidge nudges at his foot under the table. “He’ll just never say it. Would ruin his bad boy rep.”

Keith opens his mouth, but Lance cuts in, “I mean, the pieces you did in the studio were great, but the ones at your house—”

“Your house?” Pidge echoes.

“They’re so good, oh _man._ ” Lance is flailing again. “Make him show you.”

“You should submit them to the League for the spring gallery.” Pidge’s eyes are shining as she turns back to him. “Freshman stuff usually doesn’t make it in, but when it’s really—”

“No.” Keith stabs at his chicken. 

“Keith—”

“No.”

“You should,” Lance finally says, and there’s not laughing lilt to his eyes, no smirk or smile in the corners of his mouth. He’s dead serious. “You should totally do it.”

There’s such an honesty that colors his words, his person. Keith’s not sure how the hell he missed it. He’d mistaken Lance’s loudness for something obnoxious rather than for what it really is—a sincerity, made vibrant by an uninhibited voice and shining eyes. It makes Keith’s stomach flip unceremoniously, and he must look a little startled because Lance is giving him a funny look.

His throat tightens around all the words he should be saying, and it stays likes that for a long moment until it bursts out of him as he abruptly stands, chair nearly toppling over behind him. “I have to go.”

“Uh,” Pidge tries. “What—”

“Bye,” is all he says before snatching his bag and hurling it over his shoulder, barely catching Allura’s, _is he always like this?_ as he hustles for the door.

-

“You forgot this.”

Keith reaches for his phone, staring down at it so he has something to look at besides Pidge’s probably gleeful expression. “How’d you find me?”

“Dude, you are literally nowhere near as mysterious as you think you are,” she snorts, collapsing into the chair across from him. “This is where you always go to hide. I call it Keith’s Korner. Corner spelled with a k, obviously.”

Keith looks around; the VA building lounge is a cramped, windowless room in the basement with a table, an understocked vending machine, and a couch you couldn’t pay Keith to sit on. Not to mention it’s plastered with tons of no smoking signs, making it essentially art kid kryptonite. “This isn’t even a corner. It’s a table.”

“Tables have corners,” she says. “Four of them, usually. Pick one, it’s yours.”

He heaves out a sigh, stuffing his phone back into his pocket. 

“You….” she starts. “Want to talk about it?”

The hole in the hem of his hoodie is suddenly fascinating.

He can practically hear her rolling her eyes.“Right. It’s you. Of course you don’t.”

He snaps, whipping his head up. “What the hell do you want from me?”

He’s verging on shouting, but the room isn’t big enough to echo and it settles for a whine of feedback ringing off the peeling paint. Pidge’s face revolves with a carousel of mixed expressions, not sure which to pick, and when she settles on something decidedly blank. 

“Nothing,” Pidge answers, standing up. “Absolutely nothing.”

He watches her grab her bag, he watches her leave. He wants to blame her, because if she thinks they’re friends then, well, that’s her problem. He never asked for her to try. He’s honestly surprised she even stuck around this long; he’s surprised at himself for letting her.

-

Keith’s been alone for a long time.

He’s been alone for a long time, and he likes it that way. People complicate things, and if he can keep them at a distance, if he can ignore the echo of an empty house and a hollow chest, he can live in his clean, simple lines. 

When his dad tried to come back, Keith should’ve known better. But the marines had been a bust, and even though he hadn’t seen her in practically a lifetime, his mom was dead with only a dilapidated house and an inheritance with a staggering amount of zeros to remember her by. He was a live wire, cut and raw with nowhere for that volatile energy to go except to burn whatever had the misfortune of touching him. And his dad was there, asking to be a real family.

He should’ve known better. He should’ve known it was about the money. He should’ve said no, he should’ve kicked his dad out after the first fight, after the second, after the third. After the drinking, and the fighting, bringing strange people into the house who drank and fought just as much.

What it took was his dad tearing down the pencil still life of the view from his window that Keith had tentatively pinned to the back of his bedroom door. He didn’t even do it on purpose. He’d stumbled and caught himself after asking Keith for cash, crumpling the paper between his fist. Keith hates remembering it, because he remembers the way the pure rage just erupted out of him, burning and thoughtless and vicious. How mad he was, how mad he always is. That no matter how collected he tries to be, half of him comes from a faceless person who never came back, and half from a bottomless anger that never goes away.

After kicking his dad out, Keith spent the next two years pouring himself into finishing the house, and when the roof was fixed and the walls were up and the floors were all put in, he knew he needed something else to focus on.

The League seemed like as good a place as any to start. If he knew he’d end up getting wrangled into art school by a ball of energy covered in paint and wearing fake glasses, he’s not sure he’d do it all over again.

It strikes him that night when he gets home, working on refining the texture of the skin along Lance’s jaw, that he probably never had much of a choice to begin with. He figures he was always heading towards something full speed, and now there was just the inevitability of a crash waiting for him.

-

The beginning of March finds Keith lying on top of his dining room table, testing the weight, when there’s a knock on the door.

His heart plummets to his stomach, anxious beat holding steady until he hears a muffled, “Keith? I know you’re home, dude.”

Keith tries his best not to run to the door, realizing he’s only in pajama bottoms, and does a quick, helpless spin to spot a shirt or jacket or poncho or anything, but Lance is banging on the door, shouting, “C’mon, man, it’s cold.”

He yanks it open. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I knew you’d be happy to see me.” Lance slides inside, effortless and grinning, hand patting at Keith’s bare shoulder with dry, cold fingers that set off goosebumps. “So like, we talked about doing more sessions, and you gave me like...a wad of cash that’s worth way more than a few hours. And I was gonna call you, and see if you wanted to schedule something, but like, I don’t actually have your number? So.” He extends his arms, turning before letting them fall back against his sides with a dull thwap. “Here I am. At your total disposal.”

Keith is suddenly very aware that he’s not wearing any underwear.

“Ah, awkward silences and glaring, how I’ve missed this,” Lance is being sarcastic, but his smile wedged eyes make Keith want to believe he actually has missed this. Keith. Missed Keith.

Wait. “I’m not _glaring—”_

Lance is yanks his sweatshirt over his head, arms still caught inside, hat barely hanging on now. “Where do you want me?”

Keith reaches out and takes the hat off of Lance head. The hair underneath with either matted down or sticking out in odd directions. 

“Keep your pants on,” Keith says, and turns to get his own.

Lance hands are already at his belt. “Wait—are you using the expression or are you legit telling me to keep my pants on?”

-

He ends up sketching a mostly clothed Lance with various items of kitchenware—bowls, spoons, mugs, and Lance tries to pose with the food processor but Keith grunts that it doesn’t look natural, especially with Lance hooking one leg over the counter and giving what he calls his best “smize.” The sketches are fifteen minutes, tops, and by the time he has four he feels like he’s about to come out of his skin, because it’s still not enough. He could draw Lance every day for the rest of this life, and he still doesn’t think it would be enough.

Lance starts moving down the hall. “The bathroom’s down here, righ—oh my god, you got a _table.”_

Keith freezes, pinned.

“It’s _nice,_ too,” Lance marvels, walking into the room and sliding his hand across the surface. He looks around. “Do you need help with the chairs? I’m surprisingly handy, just ask anyone. Except Hunk. Or my mom. Or anyone.”

He rubs at his jaw. He should’ve shaved. “It didn’t come with chairs.”

“So you bought a table,” Lance says slowly, “but you didn’t buy any chairs?”

“I figured I’d just...” he trails off, shrugging. “Bring in the stools from the kitchen if I needed to.”

“Those stools are too high,” Lance whines, pinching at the bridge of his nose before he blinks himself into go-mode. “Okay, that’s it—get your jacket.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to be updated sometime next week! it's been a good long while since i've taken any art classes so bear with me on some of the vague handwavy _sure this is how collegiate fine arts works_
> 
> my deepest apologies if you play the flute
> 
> you can find me at [chillnaxin](http://chillnaxin.tumblr.com/)
> 
> if you liked this fic, [please consider reblogging it on tumblr](http://chillnaxin.tumblr.com/post/170131774401/drawn-in-a-klance-fic/) :))


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings for alcohol use/partying and references to off-screen alcohol abuse.

IKEA is loud, bright, people pouring in from every direction—complete sensory overload that leaves Keith’s head spinning as he hovers close to Lance who, unsurprisingly, takes to the store like a duck to water. Keith jams his hands deep in his pockets, grumbling, “I just ordered it online last time.”

“You can’t just spend all your free time putting toys in trees, Boo Radley. Sometimes you gotta get out there and grab life by the Swedish meatballs,” Lance dismisses him. Keith scowls at the back of his head. “You need to walk through and visit each little fake apartment, open all the nooks and crannies, laugh at the weird pictures they put in all the frames. IKEA’s not just a store, Keith—it’s an experience.”

Keith cocks an eyebrow. “How often do you come here?”

“Okay, one? I really don’t appreciate that judgemental tone. And two, I don’t go to school, I do weird side jobs, and everyone I know besides you is always busy during the day. So,” he says, and spins with his arms out, gesturing to what Keith assumes is supposed to be the general splendor of crappy furniture. “First order of business—couches.”

“I thought we were here for chairs.” Keith tries not to stomp his feet as he trails after Lance, who ignores him, bouncing onto a long white sofa.

Lance sprawls out. “Mm, not comfy—but stylish. And look! It even comes in black, your favorite shade of despair.”

“I don’t need a couch,” Keith says. Uselessly. Because Lance is already diving onto a bright red loveseat. 

“This is _nice.”_ Lance stretches to grab the price tag, shirt riding up, and Keith averts his eyes. “This…tida…tidafors is only five hundred. Perfect for the young meth cook on a budget.”

Keith scowls. “I don’t—”

“C’mere.” Lance swings his body around, sitting up and beckoning with his hands. When Keith doesn’t move Lance starts tugging at his jacket, insistent. Keith folds, sliding in over the arm onto the open cushion. Lance settles back next to him, kicking his legs up onto the coffee table and resting his arms behind his head, and nudges Keith with his knee to follow suit.

Keith leans back. Cautiously.

“See?” Lance tilts his chin to the small, makeshift apartment. It’s transparent, everything so obviously fake and put there with deliberate purpose, a grotesque color scheme of red and purple, everything matching too well, fixtures plastic and trendy. People wander in and out like phantoms, trying their best not to look at them. But if he concentrates on the wellworn creases of Lance’s jeans, the hole above his sweatshirt pocket, the easy turn of his grin, it’s almost—

“Nice, right?”

Keith feels the warmth Lance’s thigh pressing against his. “I guess.”

-

This is how he and Lance wind up on his bare living room floor, fighting over instructions as they put the couch together.

“That doesn’t go there.”

“It totally does—look at the picture.”

“You can’t go by the picture, Lance, go by the written directions.”

Lance throws a cushion at him. It hits against Keith’s chest, then the floor, where he stares at it. There’s a large part of him that wants to pick it up and whack it against Lance’s stupid face, but isn’t sure if that’s allowed, if they’re at that easy stage of push and pull. Keith doesn’t think so, but he really doesn’t have much of a threshold for things like that—what would Pidge do if he hit her with a pillow? Pidge has never been in his house. Pidge is still mad at him. This is all extremely new territory.

“You know what?” Lance has the instructions in his hands, standing on sure legs that carry him into the kitchen, to the far cabinet, where he pulls out the food processor. 

Keith stands in the doorway, watching him. “What’re you—”

“You’re an artist. I’m sure you’ll find use for paper mache,” Lance says as he soaks the booklet in water from the tap, throws it into the plugged in processor, and hits a button, the machine roaring to life as the instructions are shredded into oblivion. When he hits button again and the processor whirrs to a stop, nothing’s left but a giant, clumpy mass of gray. 

Keith pops the lid, turning the processor over in his hand, the mush tumbling out. They both stare down at it, and Lance starts cackling. It echoes through the entire house.

It only stops when Keith shoves the destroyed instructions into Lance’s stupid, laughing face.

-

Lance stands, hand on his hips, looking down at the couch. “Whelp, it took way longer than it should’ve—”

“Which was _your_ fault.”

“But it’s finally done,” Lance ignores him. He turns and looks at Keith expectantly. “Aren’t you gonna test it out?”

Keith freezes, and then Lance’s hands are on his shoulders, pushing him down—there’s not a lot of force, nothing he can’t withstand, but Keith lets himself be moved until he’s plopped down onto the new sofa. Lance hops over the back and sits down, whipping out his phone.

Keith leans in, frowning. There’s a new text from Allura (sparkling heart emoji, stars emojo, flex emoji), which reads _pics or it didn’t happen._ “What’re you doing?”

“Sending proof to Allura that you let me jazz up your place,” Lance says simply, holding up his phone and snapping a photo of the living room. “And y’know what? I’m sending them to Hunk, too. He needs to have more faith in my creative vision.”

Lance has mentioned Hunk before, but Keith doesn’t know much, other than that his name is usually tacked onto some strange high school anecdote that more often than not ends in explosions or messes and occasionally the back seats of cop cars. “Does he go to school around here?”

“Berkley,” Lance says, eyes flicking up to look at Keith for a moment, and there’s a silent _no, not around here._ “He’s basically my best bud, even though he betrayed me by going to school so freakin’ far away.”

“Allura’s here,” Keith reminds him.

A small laugh. “Allura…in a year, Allura will be done messing with her dad and’ll be back in merry old England, living that society life, attending Oxford or Notre Dame or wherethehellever and be well on her way to becoming some human rights lawyer or foreign diplomat.”

He wants to say something like _I’m not going anywhere,_ but the words burn too honest in his throat and he swallows them back down again, head snapping forward to look at the sun streaked room. He remembers watching Lance in the snow the first time he’d come over, that low pang he’d felt at his core. It’s bloomed, hot and kinetic into an ache that stays even when Lance is gone.

“We did a pretty bang up job, if I do say so myself,” Lance says to the room. Then he turns his head, nudging his shoulder against Keiths, and asks, just soft enough for Keith to notice the loss of bravado, “Right?”

There’s a bit of the ruined instructions still stuck in Lance’s hair, even after the ten or so minutes he’d spent picking it out over Keith’s bathroom sink. Keith’s fingers twitch against his thigh, and he settles for nudging Lance’s shoulder back.

-

When he’s going in for his 3D sculpture class, Pidge is just getting out of Illustration. He knows this because the first Wednesday of the semester she’d flagged him down with swooping, waving arms in the lobby by the bulletin board. Usually she’ll come back when his class lets out and they’ll get coffee, maybe an early dinner. It was kind of their thing; Keith hadn’t even realized it was their thing until it suddenly stopped, Pidge staring ahead resolutely as she walked past him in a horde of other students all rushing out of the building. He hadn’t realized it was something he’d miss, the routine of knowing someone is looking for him.

He thinks he should apologize. He thinks he doesn't have to. He thinks he never asked Pidge for anything, so he shouldn’t feel so hurt when she doesn’t give him anything. He thinks he’s the one who threw every token of friendship she ever gave him back in her face, and he doesn’t have the right to feel hurt.

“Dude,” Matt comes up to him Monday morning, tone so sharp it cuts through the early morning haze. Keith is hyper aware that everyone in the room in staring at him. “What the hell?” 

Keith feels a flare of indignation at that; it’s none of Matt’s business, and what’s more, why would Pidge even tell Matt? He’s so annoyed he keeps breaking his charcoal in half from the pressure of his clenched hands.

He asks Lance during their Sunday session if he’s ever really messed up a friendship, because Lance seems like someone who probably has hundreds of friends. He winces, eyes looking off to a far corner of the room. “Uh, when Hunk told me he was leaving for Berkeley.”

Keith raises an unimpressed eyebrow over his board. “You freaked out because he told you he was going to college?”

“Well, okay, so, I thought he was going to Middlebrook. He said he was going to Middlebrook, ‘cause we were supposed to go together, y’know? And then Memorial Day weekend he tells me he’s going to Berkley, that he enrolled in _January._ So most of it was that he was going away and I hated it, yeah, but the fact that he didn’t tell me….man, that really set me off bad. Like, three day weekend bender, ending up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning bad. Not my finest moment, but hey, when he came to see me when I got out of ICU we slobber cried and made up, so. Yeah. Lost my job at the diner for missing a week of work, lost that $200 non-refundable enrollment deposit. Ugh. Rough summer.”

The air in the room is a little too warm now, tense with Lance leaking potent and unexpected vulnerability, and Keith can tell from the stiff line of his shoulders that Lance hadn’t meant to admit to all of that. 

“So you didn’t go to Middlebrook?” Keith asks.

“Yeah, well.” Lance rubs at the back of his neck. “There was some other stuff. Like, family stuff and the guy I was seeing ghosted me, so. I thought maybe a gap year would be a good idea. And then it turned into a gap three years. But I figured I’ve got time, y’know? No rush. I don’t even know what I want to go to school for.” A beat then, “Maybe like, communications.”

Keith watches him reach for his shirt, pulling it on over his head as he talks. Talks and talks and talks without ever really saying anything, and Keith can hear the difference now.

-

That Wednesday he makes a pit stop at Expresso Yourself, orders the biggest, most calorific, whipped cream and caramel sauce drenched monstrosity on the menu, and carries it into the VA while ignoring the multiple doubletakes from the people who pass him.

Pidge is rifling through her backpack and doesn’t even notice Keith until he holds the drink out in front of her face wordlessly. Her eyes are calculating behind their glasses.

“Okay,” she says, and grabs the drink. “But pull that garbage again, and it’s gonna take a lot more than 800 calories and three shots of espresso to make it up to me.”

“Four shots,” Keith says. “I asked for an extra.”

-

By the end of that week, Keith’s living room is furnished.

“This is a good rug,” Lance says and squishes his toes against the new rug, multicolored with a weird zig-zag pattern, strangely complementing the red sofa. There’s a coffee table, too, bright blue that reminds Keith of Lance’s laugh, and in the kitchen Keith can hear the gurgle of a the new coffee machine because _Keith, you can’t get a coffee table and not have any coffee to put on it. You’re better than that._

They piece together furniture, eat, and then Lance pulls off his clothes and lets Keith draw him. This is how they spend their nights.

“So, there’s this thing on Friday—and before you refuse,” Lance shimmies into his pants, turning. “You should know that Pidge is going. And there’s free booze. And if you play your cards right, you _will_ see me shake my groove thing.”

Keith takes out some of the shading on Lance’s ribcage with his eraser, Lance’s words barely pricking his ears. “If Pidge is going you don’t need me there.”

“But Pidge actually laughs at my jokes sometimes.” Lance zips his hoodie. “I need someone to periodically deflate my ego, otherwise I might do something stupid, like garner some self-esteem.” He plops down onto the floor, squarely in front of Keith. “C’mon. I feel like all you want me for is my naked body and my inexplicable ability to construct cheap furniture—and I’ll have you know, I’m not that kinda gal.”

“To have an inexplicable ability, you’d have to have an ability to begin with.” Keith pins newsprint over the piece. 

“Oh! Your cold and unmoving nature reminds me,” Lance turns, reaching into his bag and pulls free—

“A rock,” Keith blinks, eyeing it.

“It’s—no, see, look,” Lance pulls it apart. The rock is plastic and hollow inside. “It’s a place to hide your spare house key. In case you decide to go on vacation and you need someone to water your cats, feed your plants, etcetera.”

“I don’t have any cats.”

“Really? That’s all you found wrong with that sentence?”

“And I don’t go on vacation.”

“But vacation, all you ever wanted,” Lance says. “Vacation, have to get away.”

Keith glares, but takes the rock.

Lance adjusts his bag, heading out the door as he calls over his shoulder, “Think about that party!”

-

Mid-term critiques go...fine? He guesses?

He uses maybe three of the pieces he’s done during class of the various models Shiro has pulled in, including one from that first session with Lance, and the other four are all from his house. The one he hangs up last that has this stark contrast in lighting from the sun coming in through the venetian blinds, tapering against Lance’s cheek and jaw, striping the long line of his neck, pooling in the dip of his collar bone. 

Keith stands next to it, arms crossed, trying not to fidget too much as nothing but utter silence greets him. Matt turns away in a fit of coughing, and Allura covers her mouth, shoulders shaking. Keith’s gaze flits over to Shiro, who is looking on with his hand rubbing at his jaw, eyes sharp. Keith exhales, slow and controlled. 

“Anyone have anything they’d like to say about any of Keith’s pieces?” Shiro asks.

One of the Fine Arts girls who always has paint in her hair, the one who always tries to find something to say about everyone’s pieces, tilts her head. “There’s something really...intimate about these pieces. Uh. The same subject over and over again feels like it’s creating a narrative, kind of? Like telling a story with how each piece is focusing on a newer, more interesting angle. And like, the quality of your work is amazing, obviously.”

“I feel like using the same model over and over again sort of defeats the purpose though,” a guy towards the back says. He’s in Keith’s sculpture class, too, and generally just likes to disagree with everyone about everything. Keith sort of despises him, at least as much as you can despise someone who’s name you can’t remember. “And it kind of feels super...objectifying? Like no offense, but it’s just kind of obvious.”

“You think it’s objectifying?” she scoffs. 

“Keith, tell us a bit about working with Lance extensively,” Shiro says, cutting the two of them off. “Do you think it’s been beneficial to work with one model for such a long time?”

Keith suddenly feels hot all over. “Um, it’s alright? I guess. He’s just a really good model, so he makes it easy for me.”

“I’m sorry,” the Fine Arts girl says again. He should really try learning some of his classmates names. “How is this objectifying?”

“Just look at them,” the guy fires back, waving a hand. “They’re sexy! You can’t tell me they aren’t like, overtly sexy.”

“That doesn’t mean they objectify him. It’s intimacy, it’s vulnerability, it’s—”

“Uh,” Keith says. Allura and Matt are at the back of the group, clutching each other for support at this point.

“I mean, like, I’m not saying he’s not technically proficient,” Sculpture guy says. “Obviously he is, so he should be trying to elevate his pieces beyond just drawing hot guys is suggestive poses.” Keith’s head spins.

“What do you say we take out fifteen?” Shiro checks his watch. “We’ll reconvene at a quarter past.”

-

When he comes home to his furnished living room, he starts rearranging things, tossing off his jacket and pushing the sofa against the wall, rolling up the rug, putting the coffee table in the dining room to see if he likes the open space more. And then he spends half an hour putting everything back, sweaty and still jittery at the end of it all.

His phone has a text from Pidge. _Coming Friday?_

He heaves out a breath, collapsing back onto the sofa. Outside, rain pitterpatters against the roof, the windows, and he thinks it never used to rain where he came from. He thinks about the searing heat of west Texas, the way it would rise up in waves off the ground, play tricks on his eyes and distort everything. He misses always moving, always going, not having time to stop and think about things that weren’t the next exit off the highway, what they were going to find to eat, where they were going to sleep. Those things had tangible, clean cut consequences. Still, somehow, Lance makes him feel lost and starved and exhausted all at once, and it combines into this consuming restlessness that jitters around under his skin, makes him want to smile at nothing for no reason. 

Thinking back on every look that’d ever given him a flutter in his belly, every waiter who’d called him a term of endearment, or every boy in class who’d worn a shirt just a little too tight—Keith had been able to recognize them as more trouble than they were worth and steered clear. He hadn’t seen Lance coming at all, and it almost makes him laugh, because how, _how_ could he not see Lance coming?

He lets himself flop over the side of the couch and onto the floor with a groan.

-

The truth is, Keith’s a twenty-three year old freshman who lives off-campus. He doesn’t go to parties, he doesn’t try to meet new people, and he doesn’t drink. He doesn’t worry about money, he doesn’t watch TV. He reads a lot of instructional books, the music he listens to is in that place between popular music that everyone knows and obscure music that everyone but him knows. He doesn’t fit in with these kids who in equal parts denounce and stress about the future. He doesn’t fit in with Lance who shrugs through any questions about who he is or who he wants to be.

So when Keith rolls up to this campus party where everyone is letting their flesh spill out of their clothes at the same rate as the liquid in their red cups, he feels too snug in his skin, weaving in and out of people who are very intent on trying to meet him. Or possibly fight him. But he’s only looking for—

“Keith!” Lance shouts, throwing his arms up. He knocks over someone’s drink in the process, their distant _hey!_ smothered by the thump of music and the static of shouted laughter as Lance surges forward, bracing his hands against Keith’s arms. He’s drunk, swaying even though he’s anchored to Keith, face flushed, wearing a black blazer and white shirt. God, Keith wishes he’d brought his sketchbook. Lance marvels at him with wet eyes, swollen lips forming, “You’re here!”

“I said I’d think about it.” He shrugs, pushing Lance back. He thinks, _Don’t look at his mouth. Don’t._

“I just assumed that was just Broody Dickish for no,” Lance laughs, and he whips around because oh, Pidge is right there, reflection of her glasses caught in a severe gleam that do nothing to hide the penetrating judgment he can feel piercing through the lenses. She sips at her cup. “Keith’s here.”

“I can see that,” she says, eyebrow lifting. 

“Are you—what’re you drinking?” Lance turns back to him, hands on Keith’s arms again, rubbing up and down. Keith thinks maybe he should’ve worn jeans without holes in them, a sweater he hadn’t scooped up off his bedroom floor. “I’ll grab you a beer, do you want a beer? You look like you want a beer.” And before Keith can say no he’s stumbling off into the throngs of people.

Pidge smiles against the rim of her cup. He glares. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.” She shrugs in surrender. “But if I did, it might be astonishment over the fact that you’re actually here. I’m surprised Lance even had the guts to ask you.”

“Guts are all that guy has.”

She keeps on, a touch too serious for someone ten feet away from a keg stand, “You should’ve heard him—sulking over you, saying _I guess he’s not coming_ like a billion times and looking around the room every five seconds and pouting.”

“He did not,” Keith protests weakly.

She gives him one last look before heading off towards some of the Animation kids standing by the kitchen, and before Keith can think of something better to yell after her, Lance crashes into him, handing him a cup that Keith sets down behind him with no intention of drinking.

“Where—oh,” Lance looks over to where Pidge has assimilated into a group of girls, huddled around in semi circle so they can compare their collections of keychains. Lance’s shoulder nudges against his. “Wanna hear something funny?”

He keeps licking his lips.

“Back when we met, I thought you liked Allura,” Lance snorts, running a hand through his hair. “Your children would be the most terrifying forces the world has ever trembled before.”

Keith’s mind reels, trying to conjure up some kind of memory of whatever he could have said or done or blinked in morse code that would ever even kind of make Lance think that. “I don’t.”

Lance hums, pulling at one of the strings of Keith’s sweatshirt. “Wanna know something funny?”

“You already asked that.”

“No—something else.” Lance leans in, breath rancid with booze. Keith wishes it didn’t make him think of his dad. “Half the people at this party have seen me naked.”

He’s talking about modeling, Keith knows, but that doesn’t stop the pang in his gut.

“You’ve seen me naked.” His side is flush against Keith’s. “Isn’t that funny?”

Keith looks at him. They’re close—he wants to press the pad of his fingers against Lance’s blush, feel that heat. “No.”

“You’re right.” Lance leans into him more, looking out over the crowd. “It’s not funny at all.”

-

The party dissipates around two, and he and Lance are on the sofa, Lance barely conscious when Pidge walks over, just as sober as she’d been when Keith had arrived. She twirls her keys. “You guys need a ride?”

“Yes.” Lance slumps forward with the weight of the word. “Bu’ not that kind.”

Keith wraps an arm around Lance’s waist, hoisting him up. “I’ve got him.”

“You sure?” there’s that amused tone again, that smirk. He glowers. Pidge tilts her head, asking, “Do you even know where he lives?”

“I—yes,” Keith tries not to be too distracted by Lance nuzzling into his shoulder. 

She cocks an eyebrow. He wants to tell her that her fake glasses look stupid. “You know where he lives?”

He’s dropped Lance off twice after sessions that’d dragged on later into the night than they’d intended, mostly because Lance has taken to lying on Keith’s new carpet and waxing poetic about his niece, who is literally the smartest kid ever ( _like literally a genius, Keith, you don’t get it, she knows all the states and their capitals! C’mere, I’ll show you a vid_ ), and how he can’t wait for summer because he’s gonna buy a new board a like, live at the beach. Lance chooses that exact moment to go, “He lives in our hearts, Pidge. Our hearts.”

-

Lance sleeps for half the ride, and then is very much awake for the other half, messing around with the radio and belting along to “Call Me Maybe” until Keith turns it off. Lance makes an affronted noise. “That is the greatest song of our generation, Keith. It should be our national anthem.”

“You’re drunk.” It comes out a little fond. Keith’s never known this kind of drunk, this soft, singing loopy kind of drunk. He’d always figured it could only be belligerent or angry, and the anxiety that’d furled itself under his ribs the second he’d decided to go to the party unwound itself, just a little.

Lance groans, sinking back into the passenger’s seat. “This wasn’ the plaaaaan.”

Keith quirks an eyebrow at that, taking a slow wide turn. “You had a plan?”

“Always have a plan…” he mutters. “And this wasn’ it.”

“Is your mom going to kill me?” Keith asks as they pull up to the house, after maybe taking a few wrong left turns. The downstairs lights are on. He’s only ever parked at the end of the driveway and watched Lance run up to the front door, but he’s not sure Lance can handle steps or doors right now.

Lance blinks slowly. “Dunno. Maybe. So call me maybe! Ba, dadada da—”

Keith grunts, turning the ignition and sliding out of the car. Lance doesn’t even bother undoing his seatbelt—he lets Keith do it for him, slings his arm over Keith’s shoulders, and lets himself be pulled out and hoisted up, a warm heavy weight punctuated by clinging hands.

“You’re strong,” Lance breathes as Keith maneuvers them up the walkway, past the crooked mailbox and empty birdbath. Keith holds his breath as he rings the doorbell, the porch light buzzing in time with Lance, who’s humming against his neck, lips pressed to the junction between throat and shoulder. The woman who answers the door is dressed in a robe, feet bare, her hair slipping out of a loose bun, and he can see Lance in her soft mouth and bright eyes. 

She asks, “Did he sing along to the radio the whole way over?”

A string of tension releases. “Basically.”

She shakes her head, reaching out. “I’ll—”

“I got him,” Keith says, and she moves out of the way to let him and Lance shuffle through the doorway.

“Ma!” Lance yells into Keith’s shoulder. “Ma, my plan didn’t work.”

“I can see that, baby.”

Keith can feel Lance’s smile. “But he _came.”_

“Is he upstairs?” Keith asks.

“You don’t have to—” Lance’s mom tries.

“It’s okay,” Keith echoes, “I’ve got him.”

-

Lance’s room is the collaboration of two people—someone in high school, and someone trying to hide that first someone. It’s a room caught in transition, wanting to be more but stuck in the same old space. He drops Lance down onto the unmade bed, and moves to the end to yank off his sneakers.

“Keith,” he reaches out blindly when Keith pulls away. He catches Lance’s hands, hold them for a moment too long, and Lance’s long fingers curl loosely around Keith’s own. Keith can’t let go, plopping down to sit on the overturned laundry basket.

“What?” He pushes Lance’s hands back, folding them against Lance’s chest, because he knows it’s dangerous to hold on for too long.

A slow smile works over his mouth. “Call me maybe?”

Keith rolls his eyes and moves to get Lance on his side, because he might not know a lot about being in another boy’s room, or college parties, or people, but he knows Lance can’t sleep on his back when he’s this drunk. He waits a few minutes to hear deep, rhythmic breathing, staring at Lance’s fat mouth open and snoring against where it’s half mashed into a pillow. When Keith lifts his head, he sees a shadow against the staircase wall through the open bedroom door. It recedes at the sound of Keith’s footsteps.

Dripping down the walls, poured over every table and shelf are photos. Lance’s gap-toothed grin beams out at him from between most of the frames, but so do other faces. Other faces with the same upturned nose and bright, mischievous eyes. Faces that advertise the sweetest brand of trouble. They follow him as he slides his hand across the worn bannister, clunking down the steps and into the foyer.

“Believe it or not, this house never used to be this quiet.”

Keith startles, then tries his best to immediately stuff it down, crossing his arms and hunching his shoulders. Lance’s mother steps forward, retying the belt of her robe, and Keith thinks maybe he should avert his eyes or apologize for bursting into her house unannounced, but while she seems tired, she also seems completely unbothered by him. Keith’s not sure what to do with that except cross his arms and listen as she speaks.

“But, now with the twins away at school, my sister, her husband and their kids moved upstate, my two oldest living downstate….” she sighed, smiling as he turned to look at him. “Though Lance more than tries to make up for it on his own. Clearly.”

The corner of Keith’s mouth twitches. For a split second he thinks about his own mom, or rather the abscess of where she should stand in his memory, and a flooding ache for Lance’s mom to slip into that empty space washes over him. She bleeds warmth. The entire house does, overstuffed with memories piled up over one another, of family dinners on mismatched plates, holidays with real Christmas trees glittering in tinsil, backyard barbeques strung together with stained smiles and sticky fingers. Everything about her, about Lance, their home, their family is nearly full to bursting with everything Keith’s open wound of a chest has ever ached for.

“Thanks for bringing him home,” she says, seeing him to the door. “I told him to take it easy, but he never listens.”

“I know,” Keith says, because it’s true.

She considers him for a moment. “I wanted to give you a warning—I know what Lance does, and I don’t have a problem with it unless I think people are trying to take advantage of him.”

Keith bleaches his face, his voice. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“I did,” she admits. Keith is at a loss, and only flinches when she reaches out to pat his shoulder. “Come by for dinner sometime. He’d like that.”

-

Keith hates phone calls. He doesn’t like speaking to someone he can’t see, for reasons that are beyond him, and unless he knows who’s calling and for exactly what reason, he won’t answer. So when a blocked number makes his phone buzz in his pocket on the drive home from Lance’s, he doesn’t even bother checking. It’s only when he’s about to step into the shower and hears a thud against the tile floor when he drops his pants that he remembers its even in there. The screen tells him there’s a voicemail, and he taps to listen without a second thought.

“Keith,” a voice says. Keith squints, not recognizing whoever’s speaking. “It’s Ulaz.”

And like that, Keith falls forward to brace himself against the bathroom counter.

“Your dad gave me this number. I’m calling because I’m looking to sell that plot of land outside of Van Horn. There’s still a bunch of stuff there, so if you want any of it you gotta come down and sort through it all. I’m gonna sell by end of month so...you don’t have to call me back. Just thought I’d let you know.”

Keith doesn’t sleep much that night.

After a scalding hot shower, he winds up making coffee in the coffeemaker he didn’t own a month ago. He’d been sustaining himself on thermoses full of instant and trips to Expresso Yourself before Lance had bullied him into a Bed Bath & Beyond. _There’s a time and a place for instant coffee, Keith,_ Lance’d said. _Never and in the garbage._

He rubs rough hands over his face, feeling haunted. Lance is in every nook and cranny of Keith’s house, Keith’s life, strong and steady like a pulse. Keith feels it thrumming in the walls, inside the cavity of his own chest—Lance has slipped past every barrier, lighting up Keith’s ribs like floors of a skyscraper.

He dumps out the coffee without taking a sip, unplugs the coffeemaker, and stuffs it under the sink so he won’t have to look at it.

-

He falls asleep on the couch that night in the t-shirt and boxers he worse out, shallow and dreamless with his mind slipping in and out of consciousness, muscles knotting and eyes burning when he blinks fully awake at the sound of someone knocking at the front door.

“Keith? Man, I know you’re home. You’re like, literally never anywhere else.”

Keith drags hands down his face, feeling every pinch in his spine as he sits up. The ten foot walk from the couch to the door seems to stretch for an eternity, room flooded with morning light and gravity pressing down on every atom in his body. 

“Hey—woah,” Lance breathes out a laugh, and Keith feels it light up another window. “Someone beat you up last night?”

 _Yes,_ Keith thinks. _This kid named Lance. Maybe you know him?_

“I mean, you’re not hungover. You weren’t drinking.” Lance shrugs his way inside, like he doesn’t care that this is someone else’s home and he hasn’t been invited in. “I, on the other hand, drank heavily. Which is why I’m here—to make with the apologizing and the begging for you to disregard whatever it is I might’ve said to you in my Fireball induced haze. Or anything I might’ve sang. Or, here’s the most terrifying thought; anything my mother might’ve said.”

Keith can’t help the bite to his tone. “Is that really why you’re here?”

Lance’s smile flags, but comes back full force a second later. “I uh, I thought I could do some posing for you today—the spring gallery deadline’s next week, and I figured—”

Keith cuts him off. “I’m not submitting my stuff for the gallery.”

“Dude.” Lance huffs out a laugh, reaching out to pat Keith’s shoulder. “C’mon. Don’t be like that.”

“No.” Keith jerks out of his reach, not even sure what he’s saying no to. Everything, maybe. “No, I’m not.”

He can’t...he can’t _do this_ anymore.

Lance tries, “Keith—”

“Would you drop it?” Keith hisses. “Just stop, okay? I don’t want to submit my stuff just to have it get rejected and-and whether I do or not is none of you goddamn business, Lance. It’s not.”

Lance blinks, rapid with his eyes turning wet and his mouth falling open with stunted words, all refusing to come out until, “I never…I just wanted you to try—”

“And who the hell are you, telling me to try?” Keith’s blood is pumping, entire body throbbing with his heart beat. “You’re a kid that never made anything out of himself—never went to school, never aspired to anything, never bothered. You get naked for whoever asks because you can’t live without the attention. So don’t tell me you just wanted me to try.”

Lance’s mouth snaps shut, eyes hardening. His voice cracks, “You’re such an asshole.”

Keith exhales through his nose. “Get out of my house.”

Lance says it again, louder. “You’re such an _asshole.”_

“Lance,” Keith wavers, stepping back. “Get out.”

“You really—” he lets out a humorless laugh, bites his lip and shaking his head. “Fine. I’m going. I’m gone. Sorry for thinking—” he steps back out the door, struggling for the word as he sniffs, finally looking at Keith with big, wet eyes as he says, “Whatever. Have a nice life.”

Keith watches him leave, and the lights go out, floor by floor.

-

He spends the rest of April going to classes and slowly moving everything he and Lance bought together into the basement, until eventually the house is just as empty as it was before. He tries working with fruit bowls, but his hands seems to be weighted by something, and every piece he makes is overworked and horribly dark, apples and pears and bananas all indistinguishable from one another. He dreams of fruits trying to eat him instead of the other way around—they chop him up and throw him in the food processor. Keith doesn’t sleep much.

Shiro tries his best to offer constructive criticism in class, but it’s clear Keith’s regressed beyond the reach of his teaching talents. He tries to talk to Keith after class, but Keith doesn’t want to talk. Not to him, not to anyone. 

It doesn’t seem to matter what he wants, though, because Allura corners him by the vending machines after class. He hears her before he sees her, the distinct clack of her shoes against the linoleum makes his head snap up from where he’s rummaging around in his backpack for spare change. Her face is set in a determined expression with her arms crossed over her chest, the heels she’s wearing putting her just a few inches taller, but the way she’s staring down her nose makes it seem like she towers meters over him.

“So what?” Allura says, her voice even. “You spend hours upon hours with him for months, then….what? Pretend like he means nothing to you? Was that all it was?”

“You know what it was?” Keith cuts her with a cool look, turning fully to face her. “None of your business.”

“It is my business, he’s my friend,” her composure breaks, just slightly. “Not that you’d really know anything about having friends.”

Keith doesn’t let himself flinch, hitching his bag up over his shoulder. “I’m leaving.”

He feels her eyes boring into the back of his skull he bolts down the flight of stairs and out into the parking lot.

Pidge texts him later that night, _call me when you stop acting like an ass._

He doesn’t call her. He shoves a change of clothes into his bag and leaves his phone on the living room floor.

-

It’s barely warm enough to bring the bike out of the garage, but barely is just good enough, and by the time he gets down to El Paso it’s more than just warm. The hot desert air whips through the threadbare fabric of his clothes, through the hair at the nape of his neck and it feels like the embrace of a homecoming.

He’s surprised he can still find it; the land itself is mostly deep, cavernous canyons, the surrounding areas owned primarily by the military. The cabin he grew up in is tucked away near the border of an air base, the dozens of acres or so between them belonging to a family friend who let Keith’s parents hide away there. He remembers staring out his open window at night and listening to the roar if jets taking off in an echo just beyond the canyons that blocked any real view of their tiny cabin. 

It’s less of the cabin he remembers, and more of a shack, due in part to the fact that it’s clearly falling apart after two decades being left exposed to the elements. He kicks in the door with the heel of is boot, the wood so rotted it practically dissolves into dust at the force.

He holds his breath. The same beat up furniture, the same stained carpet, the same blackout curtains, the same transistor radios on the same beat up desk. The boxes that were piled up in the corners had crumbled from water damage, their mostly paper contents turned to mush that’d dried into indistinguishable masses. The one free corner had a playpen that’d been Keith’s bed, and it still stands, the plastic holding up even after all these years. 

The single adjoining room had been his parents bedroom, and the mattress is torn up, a deep gaping hole in the center, stained dark brown that’s yellowed at the edges where some animal probably had a feast. He thinks he can see bones, but he can’t actually walk into the room, because it filled with boxes and toppled canned foods. Hundreds of cans; beans, greens, spam, sausages. The four main food groups for him growing up, cooked on the tiny portable two burner stove in the same pot every night. His mind flashes to the creaky floorboard and peeling floral wallpaper of Lance’s home, the sunken in furniture and the photos everywhere, warm and lived in, safe and full. Lance’s mom, her deep smile lines and the crinkled corners of her bright eyes, asking him to come over for dinner. Jealousy sears through him so thick and so hot and so hateful, hand clutching at his shirt over his heart.

He rears his leg back at punts one of the better kept boxes clear across the room, grunt tearing through his chest. Papers flutter down in an arch across the room, and when Keith gets ahold of himself and looks down, something glossy glints at him from the floor, stuck in a beam of sunlight streaking in through a hole in the roof.

It’s a picture. Keith falls to his knees, brushing the nonsensical pages of gibberish handwritten data aside.

His dad’s hair is buzzed, face full, and he’s looking to something out of frame over the head of the pregnant woman standing next to him, and Keith realizes with the blow of a physical punch that it’s his mom.

She has a hand on the curve of her stomach, dressed in an oversized gray t-shirt with her hair falling out of the bun it’d been slung back into. His fingers twitch, wanting to reach into the picture and push the inky strands of hair that are covering part of her face so badly. He needs to see all of her, all the ways they look the same and all the ways they don’t. Her face is pale and angular, mouth red with lipstick. He can’t tell anything from this; he can’t tell if they were happy or miserable or somewhere in between. He can’t tell why she left, and he can’t tell what made his dad fall apart. He can’t tell why they had to move to a shack in the middle of nowhere, if they were running from something, if they just wanted somewhere secluded to raise their baby. Every time he wished he’d just had a picture of her seems so stupid in retrospect, because he has one now and it’s worthless.

Keith falls back onto the floor, crumpling the picture in his hand. The only person he could ask about any of that is his dad, and he’s not sure inviting that back into his life would be worth it. When Keith’d pressed his dad for details about his mom’s death, he’d only said she was sick. Not with what, or for how long, or if it was something he might face someday. Keith’s not even sure if his dad wouldn’t tell him out of spite, or purely because he himself didn’t know.

“I’m never going to know why, am I?” he asks the walls. In the distance he can hear a plane taking off. He stands, pockets the photo, and walks through the hole he made in the wall.

-

He thinks, during the two days he spends driving back up north and sleeping in the seedy kind of motels he’d grown up in, that even if there had been the microscopic chance of Lance ever having felt something sort of close to wanting Keith, Keith had gone and destroyed it. All those months of slowly falling into each other, every knot of memory had been undone in one single slice of a moment. He thinks if it hadn’t been that moment, then there would’ve been another, or another, or another—the canyons of anger and emptiness inside of him are never going away. They’re too different, they come from such different places, but it still hurts. It still hurts to know he’ll never sit next to Lance on his sofa again and bump shoulders and knees and feel warmth and energy and love bursting through Lance’s wicked smiles and wedged eyes.

When he finally pulls up outside of his house, yanking the helmet off and shaking out his hair, he takes a second, standing at the end of the dirt driveway. When he’d been contacted by the lawyers managing his mother’s estate and was given the keys to the property, the house had been close to collapsing. The porch had caved in on itself, the roof was in shambles, raccoons were living in the attic, electric shot to hell, no running water. He had to drive to the gym to take showers, slept between two space heaters, and had lived off of canned foods and Subway sandwiches. It’d taken over two grueling years, but he’d done it all, pouring himself into every support beam, every nail, every wire and pipe. 

It was the kind of home he used to drive past with his dad and ache to live in, and the kind of home he’d never seen the inside of. Now he lives in one he built himself, but it doesn’t feel like he always thought it would. Maybe because he was never meant to live in big house like this, in a little town where it snowed into late March, full of people who said hello on the streets and made you buy furniture. His desert heart and bones don’t belong here. 

He inhales, damp cool air filling him, thinking, _because I’m not going anywhere._

-

“Consider it a little bit of extra participation credit if you go,” Shiro says from the front of the room. His eyes fall on Keith. “For those of you who are more taciturn.”

Keith slinks down further in his seat. No way in hell is he going to the gallery. No. Way.

“Okay folks—that’s really it,” he claps his hands. “You’ll have my comments and grades on your final portfolios by the 15th, and I hope you all have a great summer.”

With a clatter of motion, everyone surges in one direction or the other—out the door or towards the front of the room to bid Shiro a proper goodbye and linger around, trading smiles and numbers and the like with other students. Keith’s in the former group, without a doubt, but in taking a moment to stuff his binder into his bag he gets to hear Shiro go, “See you at the gallery, Keith.”

Keith tenses, mouth tight as he closes his eyes with a controlled sigh.

-

He taps his fingers against the steering wheel, staring out at the League, lit up with people spilling out of doorways, chatting and laughing. He’s been sitting in his dark car for maybe close to twenty minutes now, trying to will himself to get out, find Shiro, and get this whole thing over with. Ten minutes tops, in and out, and then he can go back to his empty house. Maybe order a pizza. He bows his head, grip tightening because he doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to be here, wishes he’d never—

There’s a knock on the window that startles him into accidentally smacking the horn with his elbow, and when he looks to his side to see out the driver’s side window, it’s the Fine Arts girl standing there in her overalls, smiling sheepishly and waving.

“You okay?” she asks, muffled by the glass. He opens his door, swinging his feet out, and the parking lot beneath him feels solid. “Keith?”

“I’m fine,” he finally answers, standing.

“Oh,” she makes the shape with her mouth. “Good. Uh. You heading in?”

He glances over at the building.

“I was just leaving,” she goes on. “There’s still free snacks at the back. Someone brought these really amazing brownies.”

“Cool,” he says, because that’s what people say.

“Yeah.” She nods, looking down, then up again with her expression resolved into a determined edge. “I just wanted to say that your pieces are really amazing, and congrats on everything, and also maybe, um, I’ll be staying here over the summer interning, and I’ll have access to the studios, so maybe sometime you could come by and we could paint or draw or whatever. If you want.”

There’s still paint in her curly curly hair, a neon pink. There’s some on her overalls too, the rag poking out of her pocket. He tilts his head, really looking at her.

“What’s your name again?”

She visibly deflates. “It’s Maria.”

“Maria,” he repeats, nodding and pulling out his phone. “Put you number in, and I’ll text you.”

Maria’s face breaks open in an honest smile, taking the phone so she can tap in the digits before waving goodbye and heading off in the direction of her moped. Keith watches her go, chest tight. “Okay,” he breathes out, turning towards the building. “Okay.”

-

He’s still hoping to just hone in on Shiro and get the hell out of there, but people from his class, people he’s never met before keep coming up to him and congratulating him. It’s giving him whiplash looking every which way at the compliments being directed at him.

Then there’s Pidge, who practically bulldozes into him, latching onto his arm and gushing, “They’re amazing, Keith—”

“Uh, thanks?” Keith makes a face, surprised she’s actually talking to him. “What’s amazing?”

“Your pieces,” she stresses. “Why didn’t you tell me you were submitting them?”

Keith’s stomach bottoms out, and he can see Pidge’s ecstatic face move with big, expressive words, but he can’t hear them. He can only move her aside as he pushes past, through the throngs of people, trying not to look as frantic as he feels. The gallery, which hat always seemed so open and big, is now a maze crammed full to bursting with people gripping onto tiny plastic cups of seltzer and stretched smiles.

Around the last corner he finds Shiro talking to the head of the visual arts department—Coran, who Keith’s never actually seen, just heard of, but knows him on sight from the stories he’s overheard of military style jackets and carrot orange handlebar mustaches.

“And here’s the artist himself!” Shiro exclaims, turning to see Keith standing there. 

“The ever elusive Keith,” Coran extends his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Keith takes it. “Likewise.”

“Your pieces here.” Coran turns back to them. “We were just discussing them.”

Keith feels a freezing burn prickle over every inch of his skin, throat so tight he can’t swallow.

“They’re breathtaking,” Coran says, so sincerely, tilting his head to the side. There are three pieces on the wall, one from the first class on the left, the center the piece of Lance in his bed, and the last a more recent one done of Lance on the sofa, backlit and soft. “This is Mr. McClain?”

“Yes, it is,” Shiro seems to be aware that Keith’s incapable of speaking right now. “Mr. McClain actually dropped off the pieces for Keith last week—way past the submission deadline, I might add.” He casts a knowing look at Keith. “But, we made an exception.”

“Each just has your name underneath,” Coran remarks. “Have you considered titling them?”

“Yeah,” Keith says after a beat, turning to look up at the pieces. “Home.”

-

When Keith walks out on jelly legs into the main space, Lance is there, flanked by Allura and Pidge and some other students who are all inching closer and closer as Lance talks with his hands and laughs with his whole body. It’s only been a few weeks since the party and that following morning, but it feels like it’s only been a day, but also a lifetime. God, he looks good. He looks good and Keith isn’t equipped to deal with any of it, not after the bombardment of emotions that’d just coursed through him while he was sandwiched between two people who literally held his future in their hands.

He moves to retreat back to the refreshments table where the fire exit is tucked away when he stays just a millisecond too long and one of the students catches his eye. A guy in a yellow polo, who taps Lance’s shoulder and then nods in Keith’s direction. Lance spins his head, still grinning until he spots Keith across the room, smile vanishing the second their eyes meet. Everything is still.

He ducks out behind the group of flower crown wearing juniors coming out of a video installation in an adjacent room.

-

“He’s not coming after you.”

Keith’s fumbling to find his keys in the admittedly excessive amount of pockets his outfit has when an easy voice from behind makes him turn, the kid in the yellow polo walking towards him.

“Just in case you’re worried,” he says. “Which you definitely are, judging by the way you almost took out that mixed media sculpture by the exit.”

Keith blinks slowly. “That was a garbage can.”

“You sure? I swore it was some kind of sculpture.” He shrugs, extending his hand. “I’m Hunk.”

Keith unlocks the car, yanking open his door. “I’m leaving.”

“Look, I know you don’t know me,” Hunk starts, stepping closer. “But I know Lance, and I know whatever is going on here between you guys? It’s not over. Not by the look on your face back there.”

Keith head snaps up, and can’t help how petulant he sounds, “I didn’t have a look.”

“Man, you so had a look. It was all like,” Hunk contorts his face—some weird parody of sad longing with an undercurrent of frustration. “But like, slightly more murderous?” 

Keith glowers and climbs in behind the wheel, reaching to slam the door shut behind him. Hunk grips the frame, holding it open. “Dude, just, please? Talk to him?”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” Keith blurts, gripping the steering wheel, and it’s the horrible truth that’s been floating around the edges of his thoughts. Why the hell would Lance want to listen to anything Keith has to say, after everything? 

“Uh, he definitely does? Like, more than anything. Look, he’d kill me for telling you this, but you’re totally the reason he’s getting all his mojo back. I’ve been worried about him for over two years, but now he’s talking about going back to school and he’s talking about you and—”

“I have to go,” Keith says again, staring straight head, because if he looks at Hunk’s openly honest face he might crumble and just follow him back into the gallery. And he can’t do that right now, he just can’t, not with all those people around. He swallows. “Please.”

Hunk exhales, letting go. “Okay. Uh, sorry. You probably think I’m out of my mind, I just, y’know, care.”

Keith nods, but can’t think of anything to say. He feels like this is a moment where he should say something, but he just keeps clutching at the steering wheel waiting for Hunk to step back so he can shut the car door.

“I uh, hope I see you around,” Hunk says, and moves away.

Finally, Keith thinks of something, looking up at Hunk who’s haloed by the streetlamp. “Me, too.”

-

Sometimes, Keith paces.

He has a lot of early memories of watching his dad pace back and forth in their cabin, in motel rooms, silently and endlessly. Aside from the inability to process feelings in a healthy manner, it’s one of the habits Keith subconsciously picked up and has never been able to shake. Up and down the hallways, across the living room and kitchen, he’ll circle the staircase, walk the length of the porch, sometimes even around the house, over and over again, just thinking, wondering. A lot of the time he won’t even realize he’s doing it.

He wants to work on his bike but can’t steady himself long enough to sit down and get to it, can’t even look at this sketchpad, wishes he had a TV like Lance had begged him to get, craves anything that’ll take his mind away from the carousel of well meaning faces and words he’s been flooded with just in the last few hours alone. Everyone smiling and shaking his hand or patting his shoulder, leaking sincerity through every pore as they congratulated him, asked if he needed anything, making notches for themselves in his ribs, close to his heart. He feels so full it’s making him come undone as he wrings hands through his hair and paces across the porch, down the steps to make another round down the driveway.

His foot hits a rock by the bottom step, and Keith frowns down at it. Reaching to grab it, he can feel it’s plastic, and remembers with a jolt it’s the fake rock to hide his spare key in. Cracking it open, it’s empty inside. 

He’s running to his car before he even has the chance to stop himself.

-

The windows in the McClain house are lit in a honeyed glow when Keith pulls up at the end of their driveway, and still he’s not sure this is the right thing to do. He’s not sure there is a right way to do this, or even if he deserves the chance to. He guesses he’s about to find out, even as his pulse jackhammers in his ears and his stomach swoops and swings, hairline sweating, hands shaking as he opens the door, he can’t run away again. Spring is buzzing under the last grip of a winter chill as he steps out of the car—it wants in.

He only has to knock once at the front door before it swings open, Keith caught in the flood of warm light, a whoosh of heated air that smells like dinner, Lance’s mom standing in the center of it all with an unreadable expression. For the briefest second, Keith is sure she’s about to slam the door shut in his face without a word when she turns to shout over her shoulder, “Lance, you have a visitor!”

A voice floats in from somewhere deep inside the house. “On a scale of one to Keith, how much do I not want to see this person?”

She rolls her eyes, sighing as she motions with a looping arm. “C’mon in. I’ll get him.”

Keith watches her go with a swish of her ponytail, and he hunches along the wall in the foyer. There’s some hushed whisper-screaming that carries through the kitchen and family room, words frantic and overlapping to the point where Keith can’t understand them. He traces his hand along the side table, stopping at a picture of Lance and Hunk wrapped around each other in soccer jerseys, smiling from ear to ear and squinting against the sun. He breathes in deep as his eyes slip shut, and for a moment everything is just home cooked pasta sauce heavy with garlic, creaking floorboards, undusted picture frames. He opens them again at the sound of footsteps.

Lance rounds the corner on a wide swing, very noticeably barefoot. Keith has seen him completely naked dozens of times, but still seeing the delicate curve of his ankle bone sticking out from sweatpants that are too short on him has Keith coming undone. Lance grunts, “If you’re here to yell at me for submitting your peices, you should know Matt helped.”

Keith’s shoulders drop. Any pretense of staying strong and controlled flies right out the window at the sound of Lance’s voice. He almost wants to laugh, thinking of all the times he’d wished Lance would shut up, and now it’s the one thing he needed to hear most to make him feel together again. “I’m not here to yell at you.”

“Oh, you’re just here to stand on my porch while I tear you apart for no reason whatsoever? Sweet, I was wondering when I’d get my turn.”

“Lance, I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, and I said some really terrible things that I wish I could take back. But,” Keith feels himself faltering, the well practiced words in his head dissipating like smoke. “But I’m not like you. I was fine before you came along—I was alone, but I was fine, and that’s the way I wanted it to stay. And then you were there and you were…” Keith looks around the room, like the word he needs might be placed somewhere in it.

Lance cocks an eyebrow. “I was…?”

It spills out of him, pouring past his burning lips. “You were _you._ Never shutting up, and-and making all those dumb jokes even though I never laughed, showing up whenever you felt like it and never leaving. Dragging me places and making me buy things that I was fine without before you came. I was fine with just my bed and my drawings and just looking.”

“Oh yeah, you were really fine, Keith,” Lance sneers. “And if I didn’t do that, you didn’t react! It took us weeks before we could carry on a full conversation without you staring at me like I was an idiot every time I said something.”

“I wasn’t staring at you like you were an idiot. I was staring at you because I—” he snaps his mouth shut, feels his entire upper body burn.

Lance seems to get the picture nonetheless, face pinking.

Lance’s mother busts through the foyer and through their heavy silence, coat on and bag in hand. “I’ll be back…” She looks between the two of the, both red-faced and uncomfortable, and sighs. “Later. Much later.”

The door shuts with a quiet click that sounds to Keith too much like the cocking of a pistol.

“I’m just,” Lance inhales deep, eyes slipping shut. “I’m just going to be as blunt as possible right now.”

Keith makes a face. “Because you’re always anything but—”

“I like you,” Lance cuts him off in a breath. “I really like you. I went to your house multiple times a week and got naked on your living room floor. Like honestly!” His hands explode into big, expressive movement. “I don’t know what else I could’ve done to get your attention.”

“You had my attention from the start, I just—” Keith tries to keep that waver in his voice steady, but the more he looks at Lance, the harder it’s getting. “I’m not,” he swallows, eyes slipping shut. “I’m not good with people.”

“You’re good with me,” Lance says, and Keith feels him move closer, and when he opens his eyes Lance is there, and real, and unmoving as he smiles. “I mean, you’re kind of a giant freak weirdo, but I like that about you. Makes me feel good about being one, too.”

Keith feels like he’s about full to bursting and it’s making his eyes burn and his lung breathe heavy. He barely manages say, “You’re a way bigger freak weirdo than I am.”

Lance scoffs, “Yeah right, you wish—”

Keith’s hand shoot up, cradling Lance’s blush warm face and kisses the doubt from his mouth. Lance makes a small, startled sound that melts into a sigh as his hands reach out to knot their fingers into the front of Keith’s shirt. When he pulls back, just enough to bump their noses together, Lance chases, lips parted and wet and waiting, breath hot against Keith’s face. Keith doesn’t have a threshold for this, doesn’t know where this is going, but he does know he wants more, wants closer.

The front door bursts open, Lance’s red-faced, frazzled mom pushing through. “I thought about it, and you know what? You’re not going to sexile me from my own house.”

Lance’s face contorts, voice high and panicked. “Why do you know that word, _oh my god.”_

“Also,” she says, “Mona yelled at me on the phone for not sticking around and making sure everything worked out.”

Keith looks at Lance. “Mona?”

“Hunk’s mom.” Lance waves a dismissive hand. “I’m not too good with the whole…oversharing thing. So there are kind of a lot of people invested in our story.”

Keith’s expression must speak volumes.

“Just my friends! And their immediate families. And Shay who works down at Expresso Yourself.” Lance winces. “But that’s it, I swear!”

-

After some very pointed looks and lasting awkward silences, Lance’s mom mercifully lets them leave with only a hand to her forehead and a deep sigh. They calmly walk out the out to the porch and wait to hear the door close shut behind them before sprinting to Keith’s car, shoving each other and trying not to laugh too loud.

The drive through the northside of town is brutally long, the fifteen minute ride feeling like it stretches on as long as the night is dark. Lance, for want of something to occupy his hands, pokes at the radio, sets and resets the stations, talks nonsensically about the fate of Fifth Harmony while he messes with the bass. 

When familiar violin notes bump through the speakers just as Keith pulls up the dirt road, Lance turns a grossly gleeful look on him. “Is this,” he asks in a voice brimming with ungodly mirth as Carly Rae describes the distressed state of some guy’s jeans, _“our song?”_

Keith cuts the engine and the radio. “Absolutely not,” he says, and leans in as he brings a hand around to cup the back of Lance’s neck and pull.

The novelty of making out in a car runs out at about the same time the gear shift starts to get in the way, and they bolt up to the porch, kissing and tugging at hems and zippers as they stumble through the front door. Lance trips over his own feet and laughs right in Keith’s ear, sending goosebumps all down Keith’s back, his arms. He opens his mouth, lips working to find the words to ask Lance for everything, anything, eyes looking nowhere but Lance’s mouth. 

“Should we…” Lance starts to asks.

Keith nods, not really caring how Lance finishes that sentence, fingers pulling at the drawstrings of Lance’s sweats, looping them over and over. 

“Wait,” Lance’s voice has gone from breathless to sharp, eyes lasered in over Keith’s shoulder. “Did you get rid of all your furniture?”

Keith frowns, confused, but when he turns to look where Lance is glaring, at the giant open space of his empty living room, he winces. “Uh.”

“I spent hours putting that furniture together. Hours I could’ve spent power marathoning Criminal Minds, or-or learning how to crochet. Hours I can never get back, Keith.” Lance storms insides, flapping his hands.

“Lance.”

“Did you sell it all to buy cough syrup and lye, Walt?”

“Oh my god, for the last time, I’m not a meth cook. It’s all in the basement.”

“What’s all in the basement?” Lance scoffs over his shoulder. “Your lab?”

Keith flicks his nose. “My furniture.”

Lance serves him a steady look, and somehow, instead of making out with the distinct promise of more in wiggling hips and roaming hands, Keith spends the next half hour lugging all his IKEA furniture up his basement steps, sweaty and trembling for all the wrong reason. Lance is choosing now of all moments to be serious, pushing everything back into its proper place, down to the inch. 

“Spend my afternoons,” Lance grumbles, mostly to himself as he shoves the coffee table back into place, “helping this weirdo boy put together furniture. Doesn’t take the freakin’ hint...bet the food processor isn’t in the basement.”

“Don’t take your frustration out on the food processor, it didn’t do anything wrong,” Keith says, slumping against the edge of the sofa after giving it one last push for good measure.

Lance squints at him. “Why’d you even buy it in the first place?”

“Uh,” Keith rubs the back of his neck. “I was in a Bed Bath & Beyond because I needed D batteries, and it was right next to Trader Joe’s.”

A suspicious eyebrow raises. “Uh-huh.”

“And someone had taken the food processor and stuffed it onto a shelf behind some towels, so I picked it up and I was gonna put it back where it belonged while I was looking for batteries.”

“Right.”

“But then I couldn’t find the kitchen appliances, and I didn’t want to just put it down wherever. And when I found the batteries they were literally at the register, so. I bought it.”

“You…” Lance coughs. “You bought a food processor because you couldn’t ask an employee to put in back?”

Keith winces. “I don’t like bothering them.” 

For a second he thinks Lance is going to bust out laughing at him, the way his eyes are shining and he’s biting his lip, but suddenly he lurches forward and kisses Keith hard enough to knock him backwards.

-

Keith can at least admit to himself that he’s in way, way over his head.

He wants to touch everything he can reach, wants to kiss and bite hard enough to leave marks, wants more, wants closer, wants everything without even fully knowing what everything is. It’s just—Lance, under him, over him, everywhere. He’s caught between holding himself stock still in fear of doing something wrong, and charging forward full force. 

Eventually the sofa starts feeling too cramped, no where for hands to scramble for purchase, or for a proper tangle of limbs, and Keith tugs them upstairs. He kicks some clothes into the corner and out of the way, turning back around to face Lance who’s halfway through pulling his shirt off. Keith is struck with how many times they’ve been just like this, Lance disrobing in front of him, in his bedroom. Now, though, Lance looks thoroughly kissed, looks like he should be pinned and made a mess of. Keith swallows.

Lance has to go and ruin it.

“Keith, I want you to draw me like—”

_“Don’t. Say it.”_

Lance splutters. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been waiting months— _months_ —for just the right time to use that line. And you’re going to try and rob me of that? Of my moment?”

Keith sighs and collapses back against his mattress, hands over his face. “Jesus Christ, why the hell did I think this would be simple?”

The bed bounces with Lance’s weight. “I mean, not to be rude, but you’re not like...super bright. That’s literally the only justifiable reason I can come up with.”

Keith peaks open an eye from between his fingers. The desk lamp is right behind Lance’s head, light catching in licks of dark hair, creating a halo of warm light. His heart pounds in subwoofer whomp-whomp-whomp’s. 

“I don’t,” his tongue is thick in his mouth, words coming out molasses slow, “don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“Honestly?” Lance lets out a breathless laugh, hand stuffed into his hair. “I don’t really know either. Uh. Like, I’m not super, um, experienced?”

Keith feels kind of dumbstruck at that, because how has Lance not been pulled into every bed he’s ever walked past with the way he bites his lower lip and wrinkles his nose when he’s thinking hard.

“I know I want you,” Keith says, voice steadied. “I know I want to touch every part of you, feel every part of you.”

Lance swallows. “Yeah?”

Keith lifts his hand, running his thumb down the front of Lance’s throat. “I want to make you come. See your face when it happens.”

“Want that, too.” Lance shudders, his hand wrapping around Keith’s wrist, bringing his fingers up to kiss them gently. In a flash of need, Keith forgets himself and pushes the tips past Lance’s lips. Lance looks up at him through his eyelashes, tongue just barely, tentatively touching the pads, swiping back and forth so lightly before Lance takes two fingers into his mouth. Keith feels like he’s on fire.

There’s a wet pop and Lance pulls off, and moves Keith’s hand down. Their noses bump, foreheads pressed together, breath hot. “Touch me,” Lance says, “Please.”

-

He doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the way his thumbs slot so perfectly into the v of Lance’s hips, or that he’ll ever recover from the taste of salt and sweat along the curve of Lance’s neck. All of the small beautiful spots of Lance that Keith has committed onto paper with pencil and charcoal he can trace with teeth and tongue. When he doesn’t have something of Lance’s to hold onto he can feel himself tremble, and he doesn’t know how he’s gone so long without ever being held.

Lance pulls back, mouth swollen with color and hair mussed as he cracks a lazy smile. “Anyone ever tell you you’re kind of intense?”

Keith pushes his hips up and flips them, staring down at Lance’s face, broken open with something quiet and shining with his wrists pinned to either side of his head against the cushions. “All the time.”

He sinks his mouth into the soft juncture between Lance’s shoulder and neck, sucking in a nasty bruise that’ll stain Lance’s skin for days and days, thinks about putting a matching one on just the other side. Lance’s lets the sweetest sounds slip past his swollen lips, and even when he’s breathless he can talk ceaselessly, each word coiling the knot Keith’s belly tighter and tighter.

“Is this okay?” Lance asks, and it’s the softest Keith’s ever heard him sound. “Is this okay?”

“Yes,” Keith’s voice breaks, and Lance’s hand slips past the waistband of his undone pants. “God, yes.”

-

Keith wakes up.

Warm May sunlight spills in through the window, over the odd ends of the room, his plastic bins of pencils and charcoal, the stacks of sketchbooks, the pinned drawings. His head is on Lance’s chest, arm slung low over his waist where the sheets are pooled. He knows he fell asleep facing the wall, too overheated and sticky to want to cuddle up to another overheated sticky body, but at some point during the night he must’ve rolled over and tangled himself up in Lance. He shuffles a little closer, nuzzling his cold nose against Lance’s collarbone because he can. He hums, pressing a kiss to Lance’s shoulder, another and another.

“I’m just warning you now,” Lance breaks the silence. “I have really atrocious morning breath.”

“Anyone ever tell you,” Keith croaks, voice sleep raw, “You really know how to ruin a moment?”

“Not lately. The guy whose job it usually is to insult me was taking a leave of absence due to his inability to deal with the full spectrum human emotions.” Lance turns onto his side, scooting down. “And just for that we’re gonna make out now even though my breath tastes like ass.”

It does, but Keith’s never kissed someone first thing in the morning, so it’s still kind of nice. Nice enough that he needs to pull Lance on top of him, feel his full weight against him. He thinks, distantly through syrupy warm thoughts of plush bottom lips and tangled legs, that he’ll never be able to unknow this. To unknow how much he loves touching because he wants to and because he can, the warmth and weight of a body unapologetically pressing down on him. Keith can feel the aching abscess of every memory of every time he’d never been hugged or held or reassured he existed, of every moment he’d forced himself to look away, reminded himself of what he couldn’t have. He never knew how much he needed this, needed someone like this, to clutch onto and take and give with the easy ebb and flow of ocean waves. 

Lance isn’t just giving him anything; it’s everything. Everything in the fingers fitting against his ribs, around to stroke down his spine and rest warm and possessive at his lower back. Everything in nipping kisses that wander over every inch of skin he can reach, eventually along his neck to his should where he kisses in nearly soundless presses of his lips. Keith wants to stay here between sheets and sunlight for the rest of always, but his stomach is empty and Lance definitely has to brush his teeth, and they have whole lives to get back to eventually. Which reminds him.

“Hunk said something.”

“Oh jeez,” Lance groans, rolling away and onto his back. “I knew he wasn’t in the bathroom that long. What did he say? Did he try to convince you my horrific pre-pubescent crush on Jess from Gilmore Girls has unfortunately had a very real impact on my current romantic interests? Because—”

“He said you were thinking about college,” Keith cuts him off, because if he doesn’t Keith has a feeling that particular line of conversation is very long and very detailed. Lance, for once, looks caught off guard, blinking up at the ceiling. Keith shuffles closer. “Are you?”

“I—” Lance swallows. “Yeah. Yes. I mean, I reapplied and everything and I got the acceptance letter like, a month ago. I was gonna tell you, but…I don’t know. I felt like, embarrassed about it.”

Keith frowns. “Why?”

“‘Cause, like, you’re so talented and you could do anything you wanted,” Lance huffs. “You built this house. Your art is so good it makes people cry. I pose nude for people and walk around IKEA.”

“But you can walk into any room and just be, like it’s not that hard. Everyone just gravitates to you,” Keith says, barely above a whisper. “You’re so good with just talking to them, and you have an amazing home, and family, and friends.”

Lance looks at him. Looks through him, and threads their fingers together tightly. “You have those things now, too.”

 _Thank you_ and _I’m so happy for you_ are what he’s pretty sure he should say, but it’s just easier now to lean over on his elbows, brushing the hair back from Lance’s face, thumb stroking just along his cheekbone. He leans down and kisses Lance’s cupid’s bow because he loves the shape of it, and when he pulls back he says, “Your breath really does reek.”

Lance rolls his eyes. “Why the hell did I think this would be easy?”

The only thing he can think to say is, “Nothing I’ve done has ever been easy.”

“Well,” Lance looks at Keith, expression soft until it lilts into something bright and familiar. He flops onto his belly and crawls half on top of Keith. “Lucky for you, I’m as easy as they come.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith bites the inside of his cheek. “Not even a little hard?”

Lance wiggles his hips. “Okay, this flirting? Literally marathon vomit worthy. Maravom worthy. I’m 1000% into it, which is...really sad, but regardless. You should be aware.”

Keith realizes, horrifically belatedly, that he actually kind of loves Lance’s rambling. He, Lord help him, finds it endearing, torn between wanting to whack Lance with a pillow and kiss the quirked corner of his mouth. 

Lance asks, “Where do you stand on the whole waffles vs pancakes debate?”

“Uh,” Keith makes a face and says, “I don’t have a waffle iron.”

Lance presses in for a small, soft kiss before pulling back, moving to stand up. “Then we better go get one.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "to be updated sometime next week" fic author literally bold-faced lied to everyone but go off i guess
> 
> i hope the wait was at least a little bit worth it!! thanks so much for taking the time to read this!
> 
> you can find me at [chillnaxin](http://chillnaxin.tumblr.com/)
> 
> if you liked this fic, [please consider reblogging it on tumblr](http://chillnaxin.tumblr.com/post/172571675086/drawn-in-a-klance-fic) :))


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